This patch makes it possible to once again build gem5 without any
ISA. The main purpose is to enable work around the interconnect and
memory system without having to build any CPU models or device models.
The regress script is updated to include the NULL ISA target. Currently
no regressions make use of it, but all the testers could (and perhaps
should) transition to it.
--HG--
rename : build_opts/NOISA => build_opts/NULL
rename : src/arch/noisa/SConsopts => src/arch/null/SConsopts
rename : src/arch/noisa/cpu_dummy.hh => src/arch/null/cpu_dummy.hh
rename : src/cpu/intr_control.cc => src/cpu/intr_control_noisa.cc
This patch is a first step to getting NOISA working again. A number of
redundant includes make life more difficult than it has to be and this
patch simply removes them. There are also some redundant forward
declarations removed.
This patch changes the SConscript to build gem5 with libc++ on OSX as
the conventional libstdc++ does not have the C++11 constructs that the
current code base makes use of (e.g. std::forward).
Since this was the last use of the transitional TR1, the unordered map
and set header can now be simplified as well.
This patch addresses an issue with the text-based stats output which
resulted in Vector2D stats being printed without subnames in the event
that one of the dimensions was of length 1.
This patch also fixes the total printing for the 2D vector. Previously
totals were printed without explicitly stating that a total was being
printed. This has been rectified in this patch.
This patch fixes a bug in the granularity calculation. For example, if
the high bit is 6 (counting from 0) and we have one interleaving bit,
then the granularity is now 2 ** (6 - 1 + 1) = 64.
This patch removes the printing of the SparseHist total in the
stats.txt output file. This has been removed as a sparse histogram has
no total, and therefore this was printing out the value of a
non-local, unrelated variable.
This patch adds a new flag to specify if the data values for a given vector
should be printed in one line in the stats.txt file. The default behavior
will be to print the data in multiple lines. It makes changes to print
functions to enforce this behavior.
Without loading weak symbols into gem5, some function names and the given PC
cannot correspond correctly, because the binding attributes of unction names
in an ELF file are not only STB_GLOBAL or STB_LOCAL, but also STB_WEAK. This
patch adds a function for loading weak symbols.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
This patch fixes a bug in the address range granularity
calculations. Previously it incorrectly used the high bit to establish
the size of the regions created, when it should really be looking at
the low bit.
This patch fixes the warnings that clang3.2svn emit due to the "-Wall"
flag. There is one case of an uninitialised value in the ARM neon ISA
description, and then a whole range of unused private fields that are
pruned.
This patch address the most important name shadowing warnings (as
produced when using gcc/clang with -Wshadow). There are many
locations where constructor parameters and function parameters shadow
local variables, but these are left unchanged.
This patch checks that the compiler in use is either gcc >= 4.4 or
clang >= 2.9. and enables building with --std=c++0x in all cases. As a
consequence, we can tidy up the hashmap and always have static_assert
available. If anyone wants to use alternative compilers, icc for
example supports c++0x to a similar level and could be added if
needed.
This patch opens up for a more elaborate use of c++0x features that
are present in gcc 4.4 and clang 2.9, e.g. auto typed variables,
variadic templates, rvalues and move semantics, and strongly typed
enums. There will be no going back on this one...
This patch simply prunes the SUNCC and ICC compiler options as they
are both sufficiently stale that they would have to be re-written from
scratch anyhow. The patch serves to clean things up before shifting to
a build environment that enforces basic c++11 compliance as done in
the following patch.
This patch adds support for merging a vector of interleaved address
ranges into a contigous range. The functionality will be used in the
interconnect and the PhysicalMemory to transform interleaved memory
ranges to contigous ranges before passing them on.
The actual use of the merging is appearing in future patches.
This patch adds support for interleaving bits for the address
ranges. What was previously just a start and end address, now has an
additional three fields, for the high bit, and number of bits to use
for interleaving, and a match value to compare against. If the number
of interleaving bits is set to zero it is effectively disabled.
A number of convenience functions are added to the range to enquire
about the interleaving, its granularity and the number of stripes it
is part of.
This patch cleans up the AddrRangeMap in preparation for the addition
of interleaving by removing unused code. The non-const editions of
find are never used, and hence the duplication is not needed.
This patch makes the start and end address private in a move to
prevent direct manipulation and matching of ranges based on these
fields. This is done so that a transition to ranges with interleaving
support is possible.
As a result of hiding the start and end, a number of member functions
are needed to perform the comparisons and manipulations that
previously took place directly on the members. An accessor function is
provided for the start address, and a function is added to test if an
address is within a range. As a result of the latter the != and ==
operator is also removed in favour of the member function. A member
function that returns a string representation is also created to allow
debug printing.
In general, this patch does not add any functionality, but it does
take us closer to a situation where interleaving (and more cleverness)
can be added under the bonnet without exposing it to the user. More on
that in a later patch.
This patch adds packet tracing to the communication monitor using a
protobuf as the mechanism for creating the trace.
If no file is specified, then the tracing is disabled. If a file is
specified, then for every packet that is successfully sent, a protobuf
message is serialized to the file.
This patch adds a _curTick variable to an eventq. This variable is updated
whenever an event is serviced in function serviceOne(), or all events upto
a particular time are processed in function serviceEvents(). This change
helps when there are eventqs that do not make use of curTick for scheduling
events.
When casting objects in the generated SWIG interfaces, SWIG uses
classical C-style casts ( (Foo *)bar; ). In some cases, this can
degenerate into the equivalent of a reinterpret_cast (mainly if only a
forward declaration of the type is available). This usually works for
most compilers, but it is known to break if multiple inheritance is
used anywhere in the object hierarchy.
This patch introduces the cxx_header attribute to Python SimObject
definitions, which should be used to specify a header to include in
the SWIG interface. The header should include the declaration of the
wrapped object. We currently don't enforce header the use of the
header attribute, but a warning will be generated for objects that do
not use it.
This patch ensures cases like %0.6u, %06f, and %.6u are processed correctly.
The case like %06f is ambiguous and was made to match printf. Also, this patch
removes the goto statement in cprintf.cc in favor of a function call.
This patch adds a VncInput base class which VncServer inherits from.
Another class can implement the same interface and be used instead
of the VncServer, for example a class that replays Vnc traffic.
--HG--
rename : src/base/vnc/VncServer.py => src/base/vnc/Vnc.py
rename : src/base/vnc/vncserver.cc => src/base/vnc/vncinput.cc
rename : src/base/vnc/vncserver.hh => src/base/vnc/vncinput.hh
This patch transitions the bus to use the AddrRange operations instead
of directly accessing the start and end. The change facilitates the
move to a more elaborate AddrRange class that also supports address
striping in the bus by specifying interleaving bits in the ranges.
Two new functions are added to the AddrRange to determine if two
ranges intersect, and if one is a subset of another. The bus
propagation of address ranges is also tweaked such that an update is
only propagated if the bus received information from all the
downstream slave modules. This avoids the iteration and need for the
cycle-breaking scheme that was previously used.
Newer Linux kernels require DTB (device tree blobs) to specify platform
configurations. The input DTB filename can be specified through gem5 parameters
in LinuxArmSystem.
C++11 has support for static_asserts to provide compile-time assertion
checking. This is very useful when testing, for example, structure
sizes to make sure that the compiler got the right alignment or vector
sizes.
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 simplifies the Range class in preparation for the
introduction of a more specific AddrRange class that allows
interleaving/striping.
The only place where the parsing was used was in the unit test.
This patch simply removes the unused range_multimap in preparation for
a more specific AddrRangeMap that also allows interleaving in addition
to pure ranges.
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 prunes the range_ops header that is no longer used. The
bridge used it to do filtering of address ranges, but this is changed
since quite some time.
Ultimately this patch aims to simplify the handling of ranges before
specialising the AddrRange to an AddrRegion that also allows striping
bits to be selected.
This patch aims to simplify the use of the Range class before
introducing a more elaborate AddrRegion to replace the AddrRange. The
SackRange is the only use of the range class besides address ranges,
and the removal of this use makes for an easier modification of the
range class.
The functionlity that is removed with this patch is not used anywhere
throughout the code base.
Some bare metal build flows seem to build binaries that we aren't necessarily
expecting. Initialize everything to 0, so we don't make any assumptions about
what is or isn't in the binary.
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.
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 makes the Tick unsigned and removes the UTick typedef. The
ticks should never be negative, and there was only one major issue
with removing it, caused by the o3 CPU using a -1 as an initial value.
The patch has no impact on any regressions.
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 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.
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 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.
Track the point in the initialization where statistics have been registered.
After this point registering new masterIds can no longer work as some
SimObjects may have sized stats vectors based on the previous value. If someone
tries to register a masterId after this point the simulator executes fatal().
This patch changes the guards for the definition of hash functions to
also exclude the int64_t and uint64_t hash functions in the case we
are using the c++0x STL <unordered_map> (and <hash>) or the TR1
version of the same header. Previously the guard only covered the hash
function for strings, but it seems there is also no need to define a
hash for the 64-bit integer types, and this has caused problems with
builds on 32-bit Ubuntu.
This change adds a trie data structure which stores an arbitrary pointer type
based on an address and a number of relevant bits. Then lookups can be done
against the trie where the tree is traversed and the first legitimate match
found is returned.
This patch addresses a number of minor issues that cause problems when
compiling with clang >= 3.0 and gcc >= 4.6. Most importantly, it
avoids using the deprecated ext/hash_map and instead uses
unordered_map (and similarly so for the hash_set). To make use of the
new STL containers, g++ and clang has to be invoked with "-std=c++0x",
and this is now added for all gcc versions >= 4.6, and for clang >=
3.0. For gcc >= 4.3 and <= 4.5 and clang <= 3.0 we use the tr1
unordered_map to avoid the deprecation warning.
The addition of c++0x in turn causes a few problems, as the
compiler is more stringent and adds a number of new warnings. Below,
the most important issues are enumerated:
1) the use of namespaces is more strict, e.g. for isnan, and all
headers opening the entire namespace std are now fixed.
2) another other issue caused by the more stringent compiler is the
narrowing of the embedded python, which used to be a char array,
and is now unsigned char since there were values larger than 128.
3) a particularly odd issue that arose with the new c++0x behaviour is
found in range.hh, where the operator< causes gcc to complain about
the template type parsing (the "<" is interpreted as the beginning
of a template argument), and the problem seems to be related to the
begin/end members introduced for the range-type iteration, which is
a new feature in c++11.
As a minor update, this patch also fixes the build flags for the clang
debug target that used to be shared with gcc and incorrectly use
"-ggdb".
This patch removes the assumption on having on single instance of
PhysicalMemory, and enables a distributed memory where the individual
memories in the system are each responsible for a single contiguous
address range.
All memories inherit from an AbstractMemory that encompasses the basic
behaviuor of a random access memory, and provides untimed access
methods. What was previously called PhysicalMemory is now
SimpleMemory, and a subclass of AbstractMemory. All future types of
memory controllers should inherit from AbstractMemory.
To enable e.g. the atomic CPU and RubyPort to access the now
distributed memory, the system has a wrapper class, called
PhysicalMemory that is aware of all the memories in the system and
their associated address ranges. This class thus acts as an
infinitely-fast bus and performs address decoding for these "shortcut"
accesses. Each memory can specify that it should not be part of the
global address map (used e.g. by the functional memories by some
testers). Moreover, each memory can be configured to be reported to
the OS configuration table, useful for populating ATAG structures, and
any potential ACPI tables.
Checkpointing support currently assumes that all memories have the
same size and organisation when creating and resuming from the
checkpoint. A future patch will enable a more flexible
re-organisation.
--HG--
rename : src/mem/PhysicalMemory.py => src/mem/AbstractMemory.py
rename : src/mem/PhysicalMemory.py => src/mem/SimpleMemory.py
rename : src/mem/physical.cc => src/mem/abstract_mem.cc
rename : src/mem/physical.hh => src/mem/abstract_mem.hh
rename : src/mem/physical.cc => src/mem/simple_mem.cc
rename : src/mem/physical.hh => src/mem/simple_mem.hh
This patch cleans up a number of minor issues aiming to get closer to
compliance with the C++0x standard as interpreted by gcc and clang
(compile with std=c++0x and -pedantic-errors). In particular, the
patch cleans up enums where the last item was succeded by a comma,
namespaces closed by a curcly brace followed by a semi-colon, and the
use of the GNU-extension typeof (replaced by templated functions). It
does not address variable-length arrays, zero-size arrays, anonymous
structs, range expressions in switch statements, and the use of long
long. The generated CPU code also has a large number of issues that
remain to be fixed, mainly related to overflows in implicit constant
conversion (due to shifts).
This change implements a PL031 real time clock.
--HG--
rename : src/dev/arm/timer_sp804.cc => src/dev/arm/rtc_pl031.cc
rename : src/dev/arm/timer_sp804.hh => src/dev/arm/rtc_pl031.hh
This patch is adding a clearer design intent to all objects that would
not be complete without a port proxy by making the proxies members
rathen than dynamically allocated. In essence, if NULL would not be a
valid value for the proxy, then we avoid using a pointer to make this
clear.
The same approach is used for the methods using these proxies, such as
loadSections, that now use references rather than pointers to better
reflect the fact that NULL would not be an acceptable value (in fact
the code would break and that is how this patch started out).
Overall the concept of "using a reference to express unconditional
composition where a NULL pointer is never valid" could be done on a
much broader scale throughout the code base, but for now it is only
done in the locations affected by the proxies.
This patch adds the necessary flags to the SConstruct and SConscript
files for compiling using clang 2.9 and later (on Ubuntu et al and OSX
XCode 4.2), and also cleans up a bunch of compiler warnings found by
clang. Most of the warnings are related to hidden virtual functions,
comparisons with unsigneds >= 0, and if-statements with empty
bodies. A number of mismatches between struct and class are also
fixed. clang 2.8 is not working as it has problems with class names
that occur in multiple namespaces (e.g. Statistics in
kernel_stats.hh).
clang has a bug (http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=7247) which
causes confusion between the container std::set and the function
Packet::set, and this is currently addressed by not including the
entire namespace std, but rather selecting e.g. "using std::vector" in
the appropriate places.
Usage: m5 writefile <filename>
File will be created in the gem5 output folder with the identical filename.
Implementation is largely based on the existing "readfile" functionality.
Currently does not support exporting of folders.
Port proxies are used to replace non-structural ports, and thus enable
all ports in the system to correspond to a structural entity. This has
the advantage of accessing memory through the normal memory subsystem
and thus allowing any constellation of distributed memories, address
maps, etc. Most accesses are done through the "system port" that is
used for loading binaries, debugging etc. For the entities that belong
to the CPU, e.g. threads and thread contexts, they wrap the CPU data
port in a port proxy.
The following replacements are made:
FunctionalPort > PortProxy
TranslatingPort > SETranslatingPortProxy
VirtualPort > FSTranslatingPortProxy
--HG--
rename : src/mem/vport.cc => src/mem/fs_translating_port_proxy.cc
rename : src/mem/vport.hh => src/mem/fs_translating_port_proxy.hh
rename : src/mem/translating_port.cc => src/mem/se_translating_port_proxy.cc
rename : src/mem/translating_port.hh => src/mem/se_translating_port_proxy.hh
A recent changeset (aae12ce9f34c) removed support for
PAL-mode breakpoints in Alpha, since it was awkward
and likely unused. This patch lets a user know if they
potentially run into this limitation.
This patch adds a mechanism to collect run time samples for specific portions
of a benchmark, using work_begin and work_end pseudo instructions.It also enhances
the histogram stat to report geometric mean.
The previous version didn't work correctly with max integer values (2^31-1 for
32-bit, 2^63-1 for 64bit version), causing "shift" to become -1. For smaller
numbers, it wouldn't have caused functional errors, but would have resulted in
more than necessary loops in the while loop. Special-cased cases when (max + 1
== 0) to prevent the ceilLog2 functions from failing.
Adaptations to make gem5 compile and run on OSX 10.7.2, with a stock
gcc 4.2.1 and the remaining dependencies from macports, i.e. python
2.7,.2 swig 2.0.4, mercurial 2.0. The changes include an adaptation of
the SConstruct to handle non-library linker flags, and Darwin-specific
code to find the memory usage of gem5. A number of Ruby files relied
on ambigious uint (without the 32 suffix) which caused compilation
errors.
When a change in the frame buffer from the VNC server is detected, the new
frame is stored out to the m5out/frames_*/ directory. Specifiy the flag
"--frame-capture" when running configs/example/fs.py to enable this behavior.
--HG--
extra : rebase_source : d4e08e83f4fa6ff79f3dc9c433fc1f0487e057fc
If there's a problem when reading the section names from a supposed ELF file,
this change makes gem5 print an error message as returned by libelf and die.
Previously these sorts of errors would make gem5 segfault when it tried to
access the section name through a NULL pointer.
Due to certain changes made via changeset 8229, the compilation was failing
in certain cases. The compiler pointed to base/stats/mysql.hh for not naming
a certain types like uint64_t. To rectify this, base/types.hh is being
included in base/stats/mysql.hh.
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
FastAlloc's reuse policies can mask allocation bugs, so
we typically want it disabled when debugging. Set
FORCE_FAST_ALLOC to enable even when debugging, and set
NO_FAST_ALLOC to disable even in non-debug builds.
These files really aren't general enough to belong in src/base.
This patch doesn't reorder include lines, leaving them unsorted
in many cases, but Nate's magic script will fix that up shortly.
--HG--
rename : src/base/sched_list.hh => src/cpu/sched_list.hh
rename : src/base/timebuf.hh => src/cpu/timebuf.hh
Ran all the source files through 'perl -pi' with this script:
s|\s*(};?\s*)?/\*\s*(end\s*)?namespace\s*(\S+)\s*\*/(\s*})?|} // namespace $3|;
s|\s*};?\s*//\s*(end\s*)?namespace\s*(\S+)\s*|} // namespace $2\n|;
s|\s*};?\s*//\s*(\S+)\s*namespace\s*|} // namespace $1\n|;
Also did a little manual editing on some of the arch/*/isa_traits.hh files
and src/SConscript.
These operators were expecting a const T& instead of a const T*, and were not
being picked up and used by gcc in the right places as a result. Apparently no
one used these operators before. A unit test which exposed these problems,
verified the solution, and checks other basic functionality is on the way.
New parameter forms are:
IP address in the format "a.b.c.d" where a-d are from decimal 0 to 255.
IP address with netmask which is an IP followed by "/n" where n is a netmask
length in bits from decimal 0 to 32 or by "/e.f.g.h" where e-h are from
decimal 0 to 255 and which is all 1 bits followed by all 0 bits when
represented in binary. These can also be specified as an integral IP and
netmask passed in separately.
IP address with port which is an IP followed by ":p" where p is a port index
from decimal 0 to 65535. These can also be specified as an integral IP and
port value passed in separately.
This change is a low level and pervasive reorganization of how PCs are managed
in M5. Back when Alpha was the only ISA, there were only 2 PCs to worry about,
the PC and the NPC, and the lsb of the PC signaled whether or not you were in
PAL mode. As other ISAs were added, we had to add an NNPC, micro PC and next
micropc, x86 and ARM introduced variable length instruction sets, and ARM
started to keep track of mode bits in the PC. Each CPU model handled PCs in
its own custom way that needed to be updated individually to handle the new
dimensions of variability, or, in the case of ARMs mode-bit-in-the-pc hack,
the complexity could be hidden in the ISA at the ISA implementation's expense.
Areas like the branch predictor hadn't been updated to handle branch delay
slots or micropcs, and it turns out that had introduced a significant (10s of
percent) performance bug in SPARC and to a lesser extend MIPS. Rather than
perpetuate the problem by reworking O3 again to handle the PC features needed
by x86, this change was introduced to rework PC handling in a more modular,
transparent, and hopefully efficient way.
PC type:
Rather than having the superset of all possible elements of PC state declared
in each of the CPU models, each ISA defines its own PCState type which has
exactly the elements it needs. A cross product of canned PCState classes are
defined in the new "generic" ISA directory for ISAs with/without delay slots
and microcode. These are either typedef-ed or subclassed by each ISA. To read
or write this structure through a *Context, you use the new pcState() accessor
which reads or writes depending on whether it has an argument. If you just
want the address of the current or next instruction or the current micro PC,
you can get those through read-only accessors on either the PCState type or
the *Contexts. These are instAddr(), nextInstAddr(), and microPC(). Note the
move away from readPC. That name is ambiguous since it's not clear whether or
not it should be the actual address to fetch from, or if it should have extra
bits in it like the PAL mode bit. Each class is free to define its own
functions to get at whatever values it needs however it needs to to be used in
ISA specific code. Eventually Alpha's PAL mode bit could be moved out of the
PC and into a separate field like ARM.
These types can be reset to a particular pc (where npc = pc +
sizeof(MachInst), nnpc = npc + sizeof(MachInst), upc = 0, nupc = 1 as
appropriate), printed, serialized, and compared. There is a branching()
function which encapsulates code in the CPU models that checked if an
instruction branched or not. Exactly what that means in the context of branch
delay slots which can skip an instruction when not taken is ambiguous, and
ideally this function and its uses can be eliminated. PCStates also generally
know how to advance themselves in various ways depending on if they point at
an instruction, a microop, or the last microop of a macroop. More on that
later.
Ideally, accessing all the PCs at once when setting them will improve
performance of M5 even though more data needs to be moved around. This is
because often all the PCs need to be manipulated together, and by getting them
all at once you avoid multiple function calls. Also, the PCs of a particular
thread will have spatial locality in the cache. Previously they were grouped
by element in arrays which spread out accesses.
Advancing the PC:
The PCs were previously managed entirely by the CPU which had to know about PC
semantics, try to figure out which dimension to increment the PC in, what to
set NPC/NNPC, etc. These decisions are best left to the ISA in conjunction
with the PC type itself. Because most of the information about how to
increment the PC (mainly what type of instruction it refers to) is contained
in the instruction object, a new advancePC virtual function was added to the
StaticInst class. Subclasses provide an implementation that moves around the
right element of the PC with a minimal amount of decision making. In ISAs like
Alpha, the instructions always simply assign NPC to PC without having to worry
about micropcs, nnpcs, etc. The added cost of a virtual function call should
be outweighed by not having to figure out as much about what to do with the
PCs and mucking around with the extra elements.
One drawback of making the StaticInsts advance the PC is that you have to
actually have one to advance the PC. This would, superficially, seem to
require decoding an instruction before fetch could advance. This is, as far as
I can tell, realistic. fetch would advance through memory addresses, not PCs,
perhaps predicting new memory addresses using existing ones. More
sophisticated decisions about control flow would be made later on, after the
instruction was decoded, and handed back to fetch. If branching needs to
happen, some amount of decoding needs to happen to see that it's a branch,
what the target is, etc. This could get a little more complicated if that gets
done by the predecoder, but I'm choosing to ignore that for now.
Variable length instructions:
To handle variable length instructions in x86 and ARM, the predecoder now
takes in the current PC by reference to the getExtMachInst function. It can
modify the PC however it needs to (by setting NPC to be the PC + instruction
length, for instance). This could be improved since the CPU doesn't know if
the PC was modified and always has to write it back.
ISA parser:
To support the new API, all PC related operand types were removed from the
parser and replaced with a PCState type. There are two warts on this
implementation. First, as with all the other operand types, the PCState still
has to have a valid operand type even though it doesn't use it. Second, using
syntax like PCS.npc(target) doesn't work for two reasons, this looks like the
syntax for operand type overriding, and the parser can't figure out if you're
reading or writing. Instructions that use the PCS operand (which I've
consistently called it) need to first read it into a local variable,
manipulate it, and then write it back out.
Return address stack:
The return address stack needed a little extra help because, in the presence
of branch delay slots, it has to merge together elements of the return PC and
the call PC. To handle that, a buildRetPC utility function was added. There
are basically only two versions in all the ISAs, but it didn't seem short
enough to put into the generic ISA directory. Also, the branch predictor code
in O3 and InOrder were adjusted so that they always store the PC of the actual
call instruction in the RAS, not the next PC. If the call instruction is a
microop, the next PC refers to the next microop in the same macroop which is
probably not desirable. The buildRetPC function advances the PC intelligently
to the next macroop (in an ISA specific way) so that that case works.
Change in stats:
There were no change in stats except in MIPS and SPARC in the O3 model. MIPS
runs in about 9% fewer ticks. SPARC runs with 30%-50% fewer ticks, which could
likely be improved further by setting call/return instruction flags and taking
advantage of the RAS.
TODO:
Add != operators to the PCState classes, defined trivially to be !(a==b).
Smooth out places where PCs are split apart, passed around, and put back
together later. I think this might happen in SPARC's fault code. Add ISA
specific constructors that allow setting PC elements without calling a bunch
of accessors. Try to eliminate the need for the branching() function. Factor
out Alpha's PAL mode pc bit into a separate flag field, and eliminate places
where it's blindly masked out or tested in the PC.
Also move the "Fault" reference counted pointer type into a separate file,
sim/fault.hh. It would be better to name this less similarly to sim/faults.hh
to reduce confusion, but fault.hh matches the name of the type. We could change
Fault to FaultPtr to match other pointer types, and then changing the name of
the file would make more sense.
bkt size isn't evenly divisible by max-min and it would round down,
it's possible to sample a distribution and have no place to put the sample.
When this case occured the simulator would assert.