Prefetch requests issued from the L2 or below wouldn't check if valid data is
present higher in the system. If a prefetch into the L2 occured at the same
time as writeback from a higher-level cache the dirty data could be replaced
in by unmodified data in memory.
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
This change fixes the problem for all the cases we actively use. If you want to try
more creative I/O device attachments (E.g. sharing an L2), this won't work. You
would need another level of caching between the I/O device and the cache
(which you actually need anyway with our current code to make sure writes
propagate). This is required so that you can mark the cache in between as
top level and it won't try to send ownership of a block to the I/O device.
Asserts have been added that should catch any issues.
If we write back an exclusive copy, we now mark it
as such, so the cache receiving the writeback can
mark its copy as exclusive. This avoids some
unnecessary upgrade requests when a cache later
tries to re-acquire exclusive access to the block.
Corrects an oversight in cset f97b62be544f. The fix there only
failed queued SCUpgradeReq packets that encountered an
invalidation, which meant that the upgrade had to reach the L2
cache. To handle pending requests in the L1 we must similarly
fail StoreCondReq packets too.
Allow lower-level caches (e.g., L2 or L3) to pass exclusive
copies to higher levels (e.g., L1). This eliminates a lot
of unnecessary upgrade transactions on read-write sequences
to non-shared data.
Also some cleanup of MSHR coherence handling and multiple
bug fixes.
Requires new "SCUpgradeReq" message that marks upgrades
for store conditionals, so downstream caches can fail
these when they run into invalidations.
See http://www.m5sim.org/flyspray/task/197
Only set the dirty bit when we actually write to a block
(not if we thought we might but didn't, as in a failed
SC or CAS). This requires makeing sure the dirty bit
stays set when we get an exclusive (writable) copy
in a cache-to-cache transfer from another owner, which
n turn requires copying the mem-inhibit flag from
timing-mode requests to their associated responses.
On the config end, if a shared L2 is created for the system, it is
parameterized to have n sharers as defined by option.num_cpus. In addition to
making the cache sharing aware so that discriminating tag policies can make use
of context_ids to make decisions, I added an occupancy AverageStat and an occ %
stat to each cache so that you could know which contexts are occupying how much
cache on average, both in terms of blocks and percentage. Note that since
devices have context_id -1, having an array of occ stats that correspond to
each context_id will break here, so in FS mode I add an extra bucket for device
blocks. This bucket is explicitly not added in SE mode in order to not only
avoid ugliness in the stats.txt file, but to avoid broken stats (some formulas
break when a bucket is 0).
This prevents redundant prefetches from being issued, solving the
occasional 'needsExclusive && !blk->isWritable()' assertion failure
in cache_impl.hh that several people have run into.
Eliminates "prefetch_cache_check_push" flag, neither setting of
which really solved the problem.
Previously there was one per bus, which caused some coherence problems
when more than one decided to respond. Now there is just one on
the main memory bus. The default bus responder on all other buses
is now the downstream cache's cpu_side port. Caches no longer need
to do address range filtering; instead, we just have a simple flag
to prevent snoops from propagating to the I/O bus.
Apparently we broke it with the cache rewrite and never noticed.
Thanks to Bao Yungang <baoyungang@gmail.com> for a significant part
of these changes (and for inspiring me to work on the rest).
Some other overdue cleanup on the prefetch code too.
I was asserting that the only reason you would defer targets is if
a write came in while you had an outstanding read miss, but there's
another case where you could get a read access after you've snooped
an invalidation and buffered it because it applies to a prior
outstanding miss.
if a prior write miss arrived while an even earlier
read miss was still outstanding.
--HG--
extra : convert_revision : 4924e145829b2ecf4610b88d33f4773510c6801a
