This patch introduces port access methods that separates snoop
request/responses from normal memory request/responses. The
differentiation is made for functional, atomic and timing accesses and
builds on the introduction of master and slave ports.
Before the introduction of this patch, the packets belonging to the
different phases of the protocol (request -> [forwarded snoop request
-> snoop response]* -> response) all use the same port access
functions, even though the snoop packets flow in the opposite
direction to the normal packet. That is, a coherent master sends
normal request and receives responses, but receives snoop requests and
sends snoop responses (vice versa for the slave). These two distinct
phases now use different access functions, as described below.
Starting with the functional access, a master sends a request to a
slave through sendFunctional, and the request packet is turned into a
response before the call returns. In a system without cache coherence,
this is all that is needed from the functional interface. For the
cache-coherent scenario, a slave also sends snoop requests to coherent
masters through sendFunctionalSnoop, with responses returned within
the same packet pointer. This is currently used by the bus and caches,
and the LSQ of the O3 CPU. The send/recvFunctional and
send/recvFunctionalSnoop are moved from the Port super class to the
appropriate subclass.
Atomic accesses follow the same flow as functional accesses, with
request being sent from master to slave through sendAtomic. In the
case of cache-coherent ports, a slave can send snoop requests to a
master through sendAtomicSnoop. Just as for the functional access
methods, the atomic send and receive member functions are moved to the
appropriate subclasses.
The timing access methods are different from the functional and atomic
in that requests and responses are separated in time and
send/recvTiming are used for both directions. Hence, a master uses
sendTiming to send a request to a slave, and a slave uses sendTiming
to send a response back to a master, at a later point in time. Snoop
requests and responses travel in the opposite direction, similar to
what happens in functional and atomic accesses. With the introduction
of this patch, it is possible to determine the direction of packets in
the bus, and no longer necessary to look for both a master and a slave
port with the requested port id.
In contrast to the normal recvFunctional, recvAtomic and recvTiming
that are pure virtual functions, the recvFunctionalSnoop,
recvAtomicSnoop and recvTimingSnoop have a default implementation that
calls panic. This is to allow non-coherent master and slave ports to
not implement these functions.
This patch introduces the notion of a master and slave port in the C++
code, thus bringing the previous classification from the Python
classes into the corresponding simulation objects and memory objects.
The patch enables us to classify behaviours into the two bins and add
assumptions and enfore compliance, also simplifying the two
interfaces. As a starting point, isSnooping is confined to a master
port, and getAddrRanges to slave ports. More of these specilisations
are to come in later patches.
The getPort function is not getMasterPort and getSlavePort, and
returns a port reference rather than a pointer as NULL would never be
a valid return value. The default implementation of these two
functions is placed in MemObject, and calls fatal.
The one drawback with this specific patch is that it requires some
code duplication, e.g. QueuedPort becomes QueuedMasterPort and
QueuedSlavePort, and BusPort becomes BusMasterPort and BusSlavePort
(avoiding multiple inheritance). With the later introduction of the
port interfaces, moving the functionality outside the port itself, a
lot of the duplicated code will disappear again.
This change adds a master id to each request object which can be
used identify every device in the system that is capable of issuing a request.
This is part of the way to removing the numCpus+1 stats in the cache and
replacing them with the master ids. This is one of a series of changes
that make way for the stats output to be changed to python.
This patch simplifies the address-range determination mechanism and
also unifies the naming across ports and devices. It further splits
the queries for determining if a port is snooping and what address
ranges it responds to (aiming towards a separation of
cache-maintenance ports and pure memory-mapped ports). Default
behaviours are such that most ports do not have to define isSnooping,
and master ports need not implement getAddrRanges.
The network tester terminates after injecting for sim_cycles
(default=1000), instead of having to explicitly pass --maxticks from the
command line as before. If fixed_pkts is enabled, the tester only
injects maxpackets number of packets, else it keeps injecting till sim_cycles.
The tester also works with zero command line arguments now.
At the same time, rename the trace flags to debug flags since they
have broader usage than simply tracing. This means that
--trace-flags is now --debug-flags and --trace-help is now --debug-help
The tester code is in testers/networktest.
The tester can be invoked by configs/example/ruby_network_test.py.
A dummy coherence protocol called Network_test is also addded for network-only simulations and testing. The protocol takes in messages from the tester and just pushes them into the network in the appropriate vnet, without storing any state.
