This patch introduces the notion of a clock update function that aims
to avoid costly divisions when turning the current tick into a
cycle. Each clocked object advances a private (hidden) cycle member
and a tick member and uses these to implement functions for getting
the tick of the next cycle, or the tick of a cycle some time in the
future.
In the different modules using the clocks, changes are made to avoid
counting in ticks only to later translate to cycles. There are a few
oddities in how the O3 and inorder CPU count idle cycles, as seen by a
few locations where a cycle is subtracted in the calculation. This is
done such that the regression does not change any stats, but should be
revisited in a future patch.
Another, much needed, change that is not done as part of this patch is
to introduce a new typedef uint64_t Cycle to be able to at least hint
at the unit of the variables counting Ticks vs Cycles. This will be
done as a follow-up patch.
As an additional follow up, the thread context still uses ticks for
the book keeping of last activate and last suspend and this should
probably also be changed into cycles as well.
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).
