Virtualized CPUs and the fastmem mode of the atomic CPU require direct
access to physical memory. We currently require caches to be disabled
when using them to prevent chaos. This is not ideal when switching
between hardware virutalized CPUs and other CPU models as it would
require a configuration change on each switch. This changeset
introduces a new version of the atomic memory mode,
'atomic_noncaching', where memory accesses are inserted into the
memory system as atomic accesses, but bypass caches.
To make memory mode tests cleaner, the following methods are added to
the System class:
* isAtomicMode() -- True if the memory mode is 'atomic' or 'direct'.
* isTimingMode() -- True if the memory mode is 'timing'.
* bypassCaches() -- True if caches should be bypassed.
The old getMemoryMode() and setMemoryMode() methods should never be
used from the C++ world anymore.
This patch adds support for reading input traces encoded using
protobuf according to what is done in the CommMonitor.
A follow-up patch adds a Python script that can be used to convert the
previously used ASCII traces to protobuf equivalents. The appropriate
regression input is updated as part of this patch.
This patch encapsulates the traffic generator input in a stream class
such that the parsing is not visible to the trace generator. The
change takes us one step closer to using protobuf-based input traces
for the trace replay.
The functionality of the current input stream is identical to what it
was, and the ASCII format remains the same for now.
This patch fixes the computation that determines whether to perform a
read or a write such that the two corner cases (0 and 100) are both
more efficient and handled correctly.
The directed tester supports only generating only read or only write accesses. The
patch modifies the tester to support streams that have both read and write accesses.
This patch moves the draining interface from SimObject to a separate
class that can be used by any object needing draining. However,
objects not visible to the Python code (i.e., objects not deriving
from SimObject) still depend on their parents informing them when to
drain. This patch also gets rid of the CountedDrainEvent (which isn't
really an event) and replaces it with a DrainManager.
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.
The Memtest tester allows for only one request to be outstanding for a
particular physical address. The check has been written separately for
reads and writes. This patch moves the check earlier than its current
position so that it need not be written separately for reads and writes.
This patch adds an additional level of ports in the inheritance
hierarchy, separating out the protocol-specific and protocl-agnostic
parts. All the functionality related to the binding of ports is now
confined to use BaseMaster/BaseSlavePorts, and all the
protocol-specific parts stay in the Master/SlavePort. In the future it
will be possible to add other protocol-specific implementations.
The functions used in the binding of ports, i.e. getMaster/SlavePort
now use the base classes, and the index parameter is updated to use
the PortID typedef with the symbolic InvalidPortID as the default.
This patch adds a traffic generator to the code base. The generator is
aimed to be used as a black box model to create appropriate use-cases
and benchmarks for the memory system, and in particular the
interconnect and the memory controller.
The traffic generator is a master module, where the actual behaviour
is captured in a state-transition graph where each state generates
some sort of traffic. By constructing a graph it is possible to create
very elaborate scenarios from basic generators. Currencly the set of
generators include idling, linear address sweeps, random address
sequences and playback of traces (recording will be done by the
Communication Monitor in a follow-up patch). At the moment the graph
and the states are described in an ad-hoc line-based format, and in
the future this should be aligned with our used of e.g. the Google
protobufs. Similarly for the traces, the format is currently a
simplistic ad-hoc line-based format that merely serves as a starting
point.
In addition to being used as a black-box model for system components,
the traffic generator is also useful for creating test cases and
regressions for the interconnect and memory system. In future patches
we will use the traffic generator to create DRAM test cases for the
controller model.
The patch following this one adds a basic regressions which also
contains an example configuration script and trace file for playback.
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 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).
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.
This patch moves send/recvTiming and send/recvTimingSnoop from the
Port base class to the MasterPort and SlavePort, and also splits them
into separate member functions for requests and responses:
send/recvTimingReq, send/recvTimingResp, and send/recvTimingSnoopReq,
send/recvTimingSnoopResp. A master port sends requests and receives
responses, and also receives snoop requests and sends snoop
responses. A slave port has the reciprocal behaviour as it receives
requests and sends responses, and sends snoop requests and receives
snoop responses.
For all MemObjects that have only master ports or slave ports (but not
both), e.g. a CPU, or a PIO device, this patch merely adds more
clarity to what kind of access is taking place. For example, a CPU
port used to call sendTiming, and will now call
sendTimingReq. Similarly, a response previously came back through
recvTiming, which is now recvTimingResp. For the modules that have
both master and slave ports, e.g. the bus, the behaviour was
previously relying on branches based on pkt->isRequest(), and this is
now replaced with a direct call to the apprioriate member function
depending on the type of access. Please note that send/recvRetry is
still shared by all the timing accessors and remains in the Port base
class for now (to maintain the current bus functionality and avoid
changing the statistics of all regressions).
The packet queue is split into a MasterPort and SlavePort version to
facilitate the use of the new timing accessors. All uses of the
PacketQueue are updated accordingly.
With this patch, the type of packet (request or response) is now well
defined for each type of access, and asserts on pkt->isRequest() and
pkt->isResponse() are now moved to the appropriate send member
functions. It is also worth noting that sendTimingSnoopReq no longer
returns a boolean, as the semantics do not alow snoop requests to be
rejected or stalled. All these assumptions are now excplicitly part of
the port interface itself.
This patch introduces the PortId type, moves the definition of
INVALID_PORT_ID to the Port class, and also gives every port an id to
reflect the fact that each element in a vector port has an
identifier/index.
Previously the bus and Ruby testers (and potentially other users of
the vector ports) added the id field in their port subclasses, and now
this functionality is always present as it is moved to the base class.
This patch simplifies future patches by changing the pointer type used
in a number of the Ruby testers to use MasterPort instead of using a
derived CpuPort class. There is no reason for using the more
specialised pointers, and there is no longer a need to do any casting.
With the latest changes to the tester, organising ports as readers and
writes, things got a bit more complicated, and the "type" now had to
be removed to be able to fall back to using MasterPort rather than
CpuPort.
This patch simplifies the packet by removing the broadcast flag and
instead more firmly relying on (and enforcing) the semantics of
transactions in the classic memory system, i.e. request packets are
routed from a master to a slave based on the address, and when they
are created they have neither a valid source, nor destination. On
their way to the slave, the request packet is updated with a source
field for all modules that multiplex packets from multiple master
(e.g. a bus). When a request packet is turned into a response packet
(at the final slave), it moves the potentially populated source field
to the destination field, and the response packet is routed through
any multiplexing components back to the master based on the
destination field.
Modules that connect multiplexing components, such as caches and
bridges store any existing source and destination field in the sender
state as a stack (just as before).
The packet constructor is simplified in that there is no longer a need
to pass the Packet::Broadcast as the destination (this was always the
case for the classic memory system). In the case of Ruby, rather than
using the parameter to the constructor we now rely on setDest, as
there is already another three-argument constructor in the packet
class.
In many places where the packet information was printed as part of
DPRINTFs, request packets would be printed with a numeric "dest" that
would always be -1 (Broadcast) and that field is now removed from the
printing.
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 patch removes the overriding of "-Werror" in a handful of
cases. The code compiles with gcc 4.6.3 and clang 3.0 without any
warnings, and thus without any errors. There are no functional changes
introduced by this patch. In the future, rather than ypassing
"-Werror", address the warnings.
This patch simplfies the master ports used by RubyDirectedTester and
RubyTester by avoiding the use of SimpleTimingPort. Neither tester
made any use of the functionality offered by SimpleTimingPort besides
a trivial implementation of recvFunctional (only snoops) and
recvRangeChange (not relevant since there is only one master).
The patch does not change or add any functionality, it merely makes
the introduction of a master/slave port easier (in a future patch).
This patch moves the readBlob/writeBlob/memsetBlob from the Port class
to the PortProxy class, thus making a clear separation of the basic
port functionality (recv/send functional/atomic/timing), and the
higher-level functional accessors available on the port proxies.
There are only a few places in the code base where the blob functions
were used on ports, and they are all for peeking into the memory
system without making a normal memory access (in the memtest, and the
malta and tsunami pchip). The memtest also exemplifies how easy it is
to create a non-translating proxy if desired. The malta and tsunami
pchip used a slave port to perform a functional read, and this is now
changed to rely on the physProxy of the system (to which they already
have a pointer).
This patch moves all port creation from the getPort method to be
consistently done in the MemObject's constructor. This is possible
thanks to the Swig interface passing the length of the vector ports.
Previously there was a mix of: 1) creating the ports as members (at
object construction time) and using getPort for the name resolution,
or 2) dynamically creating the ports in the getPort call. This is now
uniform. Furthermore, objects that would not be complete without a
port have these ports as members rather than having pointers to
dynamically allocated ports.
This patch also enables an elaboration-time enumeration of all the
ports in the system which can be used to determine the masterId.
This patch classifies all ports in Python as either Master or Slave
and enforces a binding of master to slave. Conceptually, a master (such
as a CPU or DMA port) issues requests, and receives responses, and
conversely, a slave (such as a memory or a PIO device) receives
requests and sends back responses. Currently there is no
differentiation between coherent and non-coherent masters and slaves.
The classification as master/slave also involves splitting the dual
role port of the bus into a master and slave port and updating all the
system assembly scripts to use the appropriate port. Similarly, the
interrupt devices have to have their int_port split into a master and
slave port. The intdev and its children have minimal changes to
facilitate the extra port.
Note that this patch does not enforce any port typing in the C++
world, it merely ensures that the Python objects have a notion of the
port roles and are connected in an appropriate manner. This check is
carried when two ports are connected, e.g. bus.master =
memory.port. The following patches will make use of the
classifications and specialise the C++ ports into masters and slaves.
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.
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.
This patch removes some of the unused typedefs. It also moves
some of the typedefs from Global.hh to TypeDefines.hh. The patch
also eliminates the file NodeID.hh.
This patch replaces RUBY with PROTOCOL in all the SConscript files as
the environment variable that decides whether or not certain components
of the simulator are compiled.
This patch rpovides functional access support in Ruby. Currently only
the M5Port of RubyPort supports functional accesses. The support for
functional through the PioPort will be added as a separate patch.
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.
This patch changes DataBlock.hh so that it is not dependent on RubySystem.
This dependence seems unecessary. All those functions that depende on
RubySystem have been moved to DataBlock.cc file.
