This patch removes the parts of slicc that were required for multi-chip
protocols. Going ahead, it seems multi-chip protocols would be implemented
by playing with the network itself.
This patch moves the code for functional accesses to ruby system. This is
because the subsequent patches add support for making functional accesses
to the messages in the interconnect. Making those accesses from the ruby port
would be cumbersome.
In the current caches the hit latency is paid twice on a miss. This patch lets
a configurable response latency be set of the cache for the backward path.
Fix the drain functionality of the RubyPort to only call drain on child ports
during a system-wide drain process, instead of calling each time that a
ruby_hit_callback is executed.
This fixes the issue of the RubyPort ports being reawakened during the drain
simulation, possibly with work they didn't previously have to complete. If
they have new work, they may call process on the drain event that they had
not registered work for, causing an assertion failure when completing the
drain event.
Also, in RubyPort, set the drainEvent to NULL when there are no events
to be drained. If not set to NULL, the drain loop can result in stale
drainEvents used.
This patch introduces a high-level model of a DRAM controller, with a
basic read/write buffer structure, a selectable and customisable
arbiter, a few address mapping options, and the basic DRAM timing
constraints. The parameters make it possible to turn this model into
any desired DDRx/LPDDRx/WideIOx memory controller.
The intention is not to be cycle accurate or capture every aspect of a
DDR DRAM interface, but rather to enable exploring of the high-level
knobs with a good simulation speed. Thus, contrary to e.g. DRAMSim
this module emphasizes simulation speed with a good-enough accuracy.
This module is merely a starting point, and there are plenty additions
and improvements to come. A notable addition is the support for
address-striping in the bus to enable a multi-channel DRAM
controller. Also note that there are still a few "todo's" in the code
base that will be addressed as we go along.
A follow-up patch will add basic performance regressions that use the
traffic generator to exercise a few well-defined corner cases.
This patch removes the unused file parameter from the
AbstractMemory. The patch serves to make it easier to transition to a
separation of the actual contigious host memory backing store, and the
gem5 memory controllers.
Without the file parameter it becomes easier to hide the creation of
the mmap in the PhysicalMemory, as there are no longer any reasons to
expose the actual contigious ranges to the user.
To the best of my knowledge there is no use of the parameter, so the
change should not affect anyone.
This patch takes the final plunge and transitions from the templated
Range class to the more specific AddrRange. In doing so it changes the
obvious Range<Addr> to AddrRange, and also bumps the range_map to be
AddrRangeMap.
In addition to the obvious changes, including the removal of redundant
includes, this patch also does some house keeping in preparing for the
introduction of address interleaving support in the ranges. The Range
class is also stripped of all the functionality that is never used.
--HG--
rename : src/base/range.hh => src/base/addr_range.hh
rename : src/base/range_map.hh => src/base/addr_range_map.hh
This patch removes the use of g_system_ptr for event scheduling. Each consumer
object now needs to specify upfront an EventManager object it would use for
scheduling events. This makes the ruby memory system more amenable for a
multi-threaded simulation.
This patch makes a minor addition to the SimpleMemory by enforcing a
maximum data rate. The bandwidth is configurable, and a reasonable
value (12.8GB/s) has been choosen as the default.
The changes do add some complexity to the SimpleMemory, but they
should definitely be justifiable as this enables a far more realistic
setup using even this simple memory controller.
The rate regulation is done for reads and writes combined to reflect
the bidirectional data busses used by most (if not all) relevant
memories. Moreover, the regulation is done per packet as opposed to
long term, as it is the short term data rate (data bus width times
frequency) that is the limiting factor.
A follow-up patch bumps the stats for the regressions.
This patch shifts the version of gcc for which we enable c++0x from
4.6 to 4.4 The more long term plan is to see what the c++0x features
can bring and what level of support would be enabled simply by bumping
the required version of gcc from 4.3 to 4.4.
A few minor things had to be fixed in the code base, most notably the
choice of a hashmap implementation. In the Ruby Sequencer there were
also a few minor issues that gcc 4.4 was not too happy about.
This patch addresses a few minor issues reported by the clang static
analyzer.
The analysis was run with:
scan-build -disable-checker deadcode \
-enable-checker experimental.core \
-disable-checker experimental.core.CastToStruct \
-enable-checker experimental.cpluscplus
This seperates the functionality to clear the state in a block into
blk.hh and the functionality to udpate the tag information into the
tags. This gets rid of the case where calling invalidateBlk on an
already-invalid block does something different than calling it on a
valid block, which was confusing.
If I understand correctly, this was put in place so that a debugger can be
attached when the protocol aborts. While this sounds useful, it is a problem
when the simulation is not being actively monitored. I think it is better to
remove this.
Despite gzwrite taking an unsigned for length, it returns an int for
bytes written; gzwrite fails if (int)len < 0. Because of this, call
gzwrite with len no larger than INT_MAX: write in blocks of INT_MAX if
data to be written is larger than INT_MAX.
This patch is a first step to using Cycles as a parameter type. The
main affected modules are the CPUs and the Ruby caches. There are
definitely plenty more places that are affected, but this patch serves
as a starting point to making the transition.
An important part of this patch is to actually enable parameters to be
specified as Param.Cycles which involves some changes to params.py.
The =operator for the DataBlock class was incorrectly interpreting the class
member m_alloc. This variable stands for whether the assigned memory for the
data block needs to be freed or not by the class itself. It seems that the
=operator interpreted the variable as whether the memory is assigned to the
data block. This wrong interpretation was causing values not to propagate
to RubySystem::m_mem_vec_ptr. This caused major issues with restoring from
checkpoints when using a protocol which verified that the cache data was
consistent with the backing store (i.e. MOESI-hammer).
This patch addresses the comments and feedback on the preceding patch
that reworks the clocks and now more clearly shows where cycles
(relative cycle counts) are used to express time.
Instead of bumping the existing patch I chose to make this a separate
patch, merely to try and focus the discussion around a smaller set of
changes. The two patches will be pushed together though.
This changes done as part of this patch are mostly following directly
from the introduction of the wrapper class, and change enough code to
make things compile and run again. There are definitely more places
where int/uint/Tick is still used to represent cycles, and it will
take some time to chase them all down. Similarly, a lot of parameters
should be changed from Param.Tick and Param.Unsigned to
Param.Cycles.
In addition, the use of curTick is questionable as there should not be
an absolute cycle. Potential solutions can be built on top of this
patch. There is a similar situation in the o3 CPU where
lastRunningCycle is currently counting in Cycles, and is still an
absolute time. More discussion to be had in other words.
An additional change that would be appropriate in the future is to
perform a similar wrapping of Tick and probably also introduce a
Ticks class along with suitable operators for all these classes.
This patch tightens up the semantics around port binding and checks
that the ports that are being bound are currently not connected, and
similarly connected before unbind is called.
The patch consequently also changes the order of the unbind and bind
for the switching of CPUs to ensure that the rules are adhered
to. Previously the ports would be "over-written" without any check.
There are no changes in behaviour due to this patch, and the only
place where the unbind functionality is used is in the CPU.
The memory size variable was a 32-bit int. This meant that the size of the
memory was limited to 4GB. This patch changes the type of the variable to
64-bit to support larger memory sizes. Thanks to Raghuraman Balasubramanian
for bringing this to notice.
This patch removes the NACK frrom the packet as there is no longer any
module in the system that issues them (the bridge was the only one and
the previous patch removes that).
The handling of NACKs was mostly avoided throughout the code base, by
using e.g. panic or assert false, but in a few locations the NACKs
were actually dealt with (although NACKs never occured in any of the
regressions). Most notably, the DMA port will now never receive a NACK
and the backoff time is thus never changed. As a consequence, the
entire backoff mechanism (similar to a PCI bus) is now removed and the
DMA port entirely relies on the bus performing the arbitration and
issuing a retry when appropriate. This is more in line with e.g. PCIe.
Surprisingly, this patch has no impact on any of the regressions. As
mentioned in the patch that removes the NACK from the bridge, a
follow-up patch should change the request and response buffer size for
at least one regression to also verify that the system behaves as
expected when the bridge fills up.
This patch removes the NACKing in the bridge, as the split
request/response busses now ensure that protocol deadlocks do not
occur, i.e. the message-dependency chain is broken by always allowing
responses to make progress without being stalled by requests. The
NACKs had limited support in the system with most components ignoring
their use (with a suitable call to panic), and as the NACKs are no
longer needed to avoid protocol deadlocks, the cleanest way is to
simply remove them.
The bridge is the starting point as this is the only place where the
NACKs are created. A follow-up patch will remove the code that deals
with NACKs in the endpoints, e.g. the X86 table walker and DMA
port. Ultimately the type of packet can be complete removed (until
someone sees a need for modelling more complex protocols, which can
now be done in parts of the system since the port and interface is
split).
As a consequence of the NACK removal, the bridge now has to send a
retry to a master if the request or response queue was full on the
first attempt. This change also makes the bridge ports very similar to
QueuedPorts, and a later patch will change the bridge to use these. A
first step in this direction is taken by aligning the name of the
member functions, as done by this patch.
A bit of tidying up has also been done as part of the simplifications.
Surprisingly, this patch has no impact on any of the
regressions. Hence, there was never any NACKs issued. In a follow-up
patch I would suggest changing the size of the bridge buffers set in
FSConfig.py to also test the situation where the bridge fills up.
This patch extends the queued port interfaces with methods for
scheduling the transmission of a timing request/response. The methods
are named similar to the corresponding sendTiming(Snoop)Req/Resp,
replacing the "send" with "sched". As the queues are currently
unbounded, the methods always succeed and hence do not return a value.
This functionality was previously provided in the subclasses by
calling PacketQueue::schedSendTiming with the appropriate
parameters. With this change, there is no need to introduce these
extra methods in the subclasses, and the use of the queued interface
is more uniform and explicit.
This patch allows packets to be enqueued in the same tick as they are
intended to be sent. This does not imply they actually are sent that
tick, although that is possible.
This change is useful for module that use the queued ports primarly to
avoid handling the flow control involved in sending and retrying
packets.
This patch moves the clock of the CPU, bus, and numerous devices to
the new class ClockedObject, that sits in between the SimObject and
MemObject in the class hierarchy. Although there are currently a fair
amount of MemObjects that do not make use of the clock, they
potentially should do so, e.g. the caches should at some point have
the same clock as the CPU, potentially with a 1:n ratio. This patch
does not introduce any new clock objects or object hierarchies
(clusters, clock domains etc), but is still a step in the direction of
having a more structured approach clock domains.
The most contentious part of this patch is the serialisation of clocks
that some of the modules (but not all) did previously. This
serialisation should not be needed as the clock is set through the
parameters even when restoring from the checkpoint. In other words,
the state is "stored" in the Python code that creates the modules.
The nextCycle methods are also simplified and the clock phase
parameter of the CPU is removed (this could be part of a clock object
once they are introduced).
This patch fixes some problems with the drain/switchout functionality
for the O3 cpu and for the ARM ISA and adds some useful debug print
statements.
This is an incremental fix as there are still a few bugs/mem leaks with the
switchout code. Particularly when switching from an O3CPU to a
TimingSimpleCPU. However, when switching from O3 to O3 cores with the ARM ISA
I haven't encountered any more assertion failures; now the kernel will
typically panic inside of simulation.
This patch moves instantiateTopology into Ruby.py and removes the
mem/ruby/network/topologies directory. It also adds some extra inheritance to
the topologies to clean up some issues in the existing topologies.
Off-by-one loop termination meant that we were stuffing
the terminating '\0' into the std::string value, which
makes for difficult-to-debug string comparison failures.
removes the optimization that forwards an exclusive copy to a requester on a
read, only for the i-cache. this optimization isn't necessary because we
typically won't be writing to the i-cache.
This patch changes the simple memory to have a single slave port
rather than a vector port. The simple memory makes no attempts at
modelling the contention between multiple ports, and any such
multiplexing and demultiplexing could be done in a bus (or crossbar)
outside the memory controller. This scenario also matches with the
ongoing work on a SimpleDRAM model, which will be a single-ported
single-channel controller that can be used in conjunction with a bus
(or crossbar) to create a multi-port multi-channel controller.
There are only very few regressions that make use of the vector port,
and these are all for functional accesses only. To facilitate these
cases, memtest and memtest-ruby have been updated to also have a
"functional" bus to perform the (de)multiplexing of the functional
memory accesses.
This patch removes printConfig() functions from all structures in Ruby.
Most of the information is already part of config.ini, and where ever it
is not, it would become in due course.
This patch models a cache as separate tag and data arrays. The patch exposes
the banked array as another resource that is checked by SLICC before a
transition is allowed to execute. This is similar to how TBE entries and slots
in output ports are modeled.
Updates to Ruby to support statistics counting of cache accesses. This feature
serves multiple purposes beyond simple stats collection. It provides the
foundation for ruby to model the cache tag and data arrays as physical
resources, as well as provide the necessary input data for McPAT power
modeling.
Instead of just passing a list of controllers to the makeTopology function
in src/mem/ruby/network/topologies/<Topo>.py we pass in a function pointer
which knows how to make the topology, possibly with some extra state set
in the configs/ruby/<protocol>.py file. Thus, we can move all of the files
from network/topologies to configs/topologies. A new class BaseTopology
is added which all topologies in configs/topologies must inheirit from and
follow its API.
--HG--
rename : src/mem/ruby/network/topologies/Crossbar.py => configs/topologies/Crossbar.py
rename : src/mem/ruby/network/topologies/Mesh.py => configs/topologies/Mesh.py
rename : src/mem/ruby/network/topologies/MeshDirCorners.py => configs/topologies/MeshDirCorners.py
rename : src/mem/ruby/network/topologies/Pt2Pt.py => configs/topologies/Pt2Pt.py
rename : src/mem/ruby/network/topologies/Torus.py => configs/topologies/Torus.py
This patch makes the queue implementation in the SimpleTimingPort
private to avoid confusion with the protected member queue in the
QueuedSlavePort. The SimpleTimingPort provides the queue_impl to the
QueuedSlavePort and it can be accessed via the reference in the base
class. The use of the member name queue is thus no longer overloaded.
This patch is a first step to align the port names used in the Python
world and the C++ world. Ultimately it serves to make the use of
config.json together with output from the simulation easier, including
post-processing of statistics.
Most notably, the CPU, cache, and bus is addressed in this patch, and
there might be other ports that should be updated accordingly. The
dash name separator has also been replaced with a "." which is what is
used to concatenate the names in python, and a separation is made
between the master and slave port in the bus.
This patch changes the default bus width to a more sensible 8 bytes
(64 bits), which is in line with most on-chip buses. Although there
are cases where a wider or narrower bus is useful, the 8 bytes is a
good compromise to serve as the default.
This patch changes essentially all statistics, and will be bundled
with the outstanding changes to the bus.
This patch splits the existing buses into multiple layers. The
non-coherent bus is split into a request and a response layer, and the
coherent bus adds an additional layer for the snoop responses. The
layer is modified to be templatised on the port type, such that the
different layers can have retryLists with either master or slave
ports. This patch also removes the dynamic cast from the retry, as
previously promised when moving the recvRetry from the port base class
to the master/slave port respectively.
Overall, the split bus more closely reflects any modern on-chip bus
and should be at step in the right direction. From this point, it
would be reasonable straight forward to add separate layers (and thus
contention points and arbitration) for each port and thus create a
true crossbar.
The regressions all produce the correct output, but have varying
degrees of changes to their statistics. A separate patch will be
pushed with the updates to the reference statistics.
This patch moves all flow control, arbitration and state information
into a bus layer. The layer is thus responsible for all the state
transitions, and for keeping hold of the retry list. Consequently the
layer is also responsible for the draining.
With this change, the non-coherent and coherent bus are given a single
layer to avoid changing any temporal behaviour, but the patch opens up
for adding more layers.
This patch adds a state enum and member variable in the bus, tracking
the bus state, thus eliminating the need for tickNextIdle and inRetry,
and fixing an issue that allowed the bus to be occupied by multiple
packets at once (hopefully it also makes it easier to understand the
code).
The bus, in its current form, uses tickNextIdle and inRetry to keep
track of the state of the bus. However, it only updates tickNextIdle
_after_ forwarding a packet using sendTiming, and the result is that
the bus is still seen as idle, and a module that receives the packet
and starts transmitting new packets in zero time will still see the
bus as idle (and this is done by a number of DMA devices). The issue
can also be seen in isOccupied where the bus calls reschedule on an
event instead of schedule.
This patch addresses the problem by marking the bus as _not_ idle
already by the time we conclude that the bus is not occupied and we
will deal with the packet.
As a result of not allowing multiple packets to occupy the bus, some
regressions have slight changes in their statistics. A separate patch
updates these accordingly.
Further ahead, a follow-on patch will introduce a separate state
variable for request/responses/snoop responses, and thus implement a
split request/response bus with separate flow control for the
different message types (even further ahead it will introduce a
multi-layer bus).
This patch makes getAddrRanges const throughout the code base. There
is no reason why it should not be, and making it const prevents adding
any unintentional side-effects.
This patch adds getAddrRanges to the master port, and thus avoids
going through getSlavePort to be able to ask the slave. Similar to the
previous patch that added isSnooping to the SlavePort, this patch aims
to introduce an additional level of hierarchy in the ports (base port
being protocol-agnostic) and getSlave/MasterPort will return port
pointers to these base classes.
The function is named getAddrRanges also on the master port, but does
nothing besides asking the connected slave port. The slave port, as
before, has to provide an implementation and actually produce a list
of address ranges. The initial design used the name getSlaveAddrRanges
for the new function, but the more verbose name was later changed.
This patch adds isSnooping to the slave port, and thus avoids going
through getMasterPort to be able to ask the master. Over the course of
the next few patches, all getMasterPort/getSlavePort in Port and
MemObject are to be protocol agnostic, and the snooping is part of the
protocol layer.
The function is already present on the master port, where it is
implemented by the module itself, e.g. a cache. On the slave side, it
is merely asking the connected master port. The same name is used by
both functions despite their difference in behaviour. The initial
design used isMasterSnooping on the slave port side, but the more
verbose function name was later changed.
This patch is the last part of moving all protocol-related
functionality out of the Port base class. All the send/recv functions
are already moved, and the retry (which still governs all the timing
transport functions) is the only part that remained in the base class.
The only point where this currently causes a bit of inconvenience is
in the bus where the retry list is global and holds Port pointers (not
Master/SlavePort). This is about to change with the split into a
request/response bus and will soon be removed anyway.
The patch has no impact on any regressions.
This patch is the result of static analysis identifying a number of
memory leaks. The leaks are all benign as they are a result of not
deallocating memory in the desctructor. The fix still has value as it
removes false positives in the static analysis.
The LRU policy always evicted the least recently touched way, even if it
contained valid data and another way was invalid, as can happen if a block has
been invalidated by coherance. This can result in caches never warming up even
though they are replacing blocks. This modifies the LRU policy to move blocks
to LRU position on invalidation.
Currently when multiple CPUs perform a load-linked/store-conditional sequence,
the loads all create a list of reservations which is then scanned when the
stores occur. A reservation matching the context and address of the store is
sought, BUT all reservations matching the address are also erased at this point.
The upshot is that a store-conditional will remove all reservations even if the
store itself does not succeed. A livelock was observed using 7-8 CPUs where a
thread would erase the reservations of other threads, not succeed, loop and put
its own reservation in again only to have it blown by another thread that
unsuccessfully now tries to store-conditional -- no forward progress was made,
hanging the system.
The correct way to do this is to only blow a reservation when a store
(conditional or not) actually /occurs/ to its address. One thread always wins
(the one that does the store-conditional first).
This patch is a temporary fix until Andreas' four-phase patches
get reviewed and committed. Removing FastAlloc seems to have exposed
an issue which previously was reasonable rare in which packets are freed
before the sending cache is done with them. This change puts incoming packets
no a pendingDelete queue which are deleted at the start of the next call and
thus breaks the dependency between when the caller returns true and when the
packet is actually used by the sending cache.
Running valgrind on a multi-core linux boot and the memtester results in no
valgrind warnings.
While FastAlloc provides a small performance increase (~1.5%) over regular malloc it isn't thread safe.
After removing FastAlloc and using tcmalloc I've seen a performance increase of 12% over libc malloc
when running twolf for ARM.
This patch introduces a class hierarchy of buses, a non-coherent one,
and a coherent one, splitting the existing bus functionality. By doing
so it also enables further specialisation of the two types of buses.
A non-coherent bus connects a number of non-snooping masters and
slaves, and routes the request and response packets based on the
address. The request packets issued by the master connected to a
non-coherent bus could still snoop in caches attached to a coherent
bus, as is the case with the I/O bus and memory bus in most system
configurations. No snoops will, however, reach any master on the
non-coherent bus itself. The non-coherent bus can be used as a
template for modelling PCI, PCIe, and non-coherent AMBA and OCP buses,
and is typically used for the I/O buses.
A coherent bus connects a number of (potentially) snooping masters and
slaves, and routes the request and response packets based on the
address, and also forwards all requests to the snoopers and deals with
the snoop responses. The coherent bus can be used as a template for
modelling QPI, HyperTransport, ACE and coherent OCP buses, and is
typically used for the L1-to-L2 buses and as the main system
interconnect.
The configuration scripts are updated to use a NoncoherentBus for all
peripheral and I/O buses.
A bit of minor tidying up has also been done.
--HG--
rename : src/mem/bus.cc => src/mem/coherent_bus.cc
rename : src/mem/bus.hh => src/mem/coherent_bus.hh
rename : src/mem/bus.cc => src/mem/noncoherent_bus.cc
rename : src/mem/bus.hh => src/mem/noncoherent_bus.hh
This patch merely remove the Packet* from the isOccupied member
function. Historically this was used to check if the packet was an
express snoop, but this is now done outside this function (where
relevant).
The main aim of this patch is to arrive at a suitable port interface
for vector ports, including both the packet and the port id. This
patch changes the bus transport functions
(recvFunctional/Atomic/Timing) to require a PortId parameter
indicating the source port. Previously this information was passed by
setting the source field of the packet, and this is only required in
the case of a timing request.
With this patch, the use of the source and destination field is also
more restrictive, as they are only needed for timing accesses. The
modifications to these fields for atomic snoops is now removed
entirely, also making minor modifications to the cache.
This patch removes the Packet::NodeID typedef and unifies it with the
Port::PortId. The src and dest fields in the packet are used to hold a
port id (e.g. in the bus), and thus the two should actually be the
same.
The typedef PortID is now global (in base/types.hh) and aligned with
the ThreadID in terms of capitalisation and naming of the
InvalidPortID constant.
Before this patch, two flags were used for valid destination and
source, rather than relying on a named value (InvalidPortID), and
this is now redundant, as the src and dest field themselves are
sufficient to tell whether the current value is a valid port
identifier or not. Consequently, the VALID_SRC and VALID_DST are
removed.
As part of the cleaning up, a number of int parameters and local
variables are updated to use PortID.
Note that Ruby still has its own NodeID typedef. Furthermore, the
MemObject getMaster/SlavePort still has an int idx parameter with a
default value of -1 which should eventually change to PortID idx =
InvalidPortID.
This patch updates the comments for the src and dest fields to reflect
their actual use. Due to a number of patches (e.g. removing the
Broadcast flag), the old comments are no longer indicative of the
current usage.
This patch splits the PacketBuffer class into a RequestState and a
DeferredRequest and DeferredResponse. Only the requests need a
SenderState, and the deferred requests and responses only need an
associated point in time for the request and the response queue.
Besides the cleaning up, the goal is to simplify the transition to a
new port handshake, and with these changes, the two packet queues are
starting to look very similar to the generic packet queue, but
currently they do a few unique things relating to the NACK and
counting of requests/responses that the packet queue cannot be
conveniently used. This will be addressed in a later patch.
This patch removes unused commands and attributes from the packet to
avoid any confusion. It is part of an effort to clear up how and where
different commands and attributes are used.
The scheduling of the deadlock check event was being done incorrectly as the
clock was not being multiplied, so as to convert the time into ticks. This
patch removes that bug.
This patch adds a communication monitor MemObject that can be inserted
between a master and slave port to provide a range of statistics about
the communication passing through it. The communication monitor is
non-invasive and does not change any properties or timing of the
packets, with the exception of adding a sender state to be able to
track latency. The statistics are only collected in timing mode (not
atomic) to avoid slowing down any fast forwarding.
An example of the statistics captured by the monitor are: read/write
burst lengths, bandwidth, request-response latency, outstanding
transactions, inter transaction time, transaction count, and address
distribution. The monitor can be used in combination with periodic
resetting and dumping of stats (through schedStatEvent) to study the
behaviour over time.
In future patches, a selection of convenience scripts will be added to
aid in visualising the statistics collected by the monitor.
This patch adds a guarding if-statement to avoid forwarding
uncacheable requests (or rather their corresponding request packets)
to bus snoopers. These packets should never have any effect on the
caches, and thus there is no need to forward them to the snoopers.
This patch fixes a bug that caused snoop requests to be placed in a
packet queue. Instead, the packet is now sent immediately using
sendTimingSnoopReq, thus bypassing the packet queue and any normal
responses waiting to be sent.
