The previous slower ruby latencies created a mismatch between the faster M5
cpu models and the much slower ruby memory system. Specifically smp
interrupts were much slower and infrequent, as well as cpus moving in and out
of spin locks. The result was many cpus were idle for large periods of time.
These changes fix the latency mismatch.
This patch adds DMA testing to the Memtester and is inherits many changes from
Polina's old tester_dma_extension patch. Since Ruby does not work in atomic
mode, the atomic mode options are removed.
This patch attaches ruby objects to the system before the topology is
created so that their simobject names read their meaningful variable
names instead of their topology name.
The separate restoreCheckpoint() call is gone; just pass
the checkpoint dir as an optional arg to instantiate().
This change is a precursor to some more extensive
reworking of the startup code.
Enforce that the Python Root SimObject is instantiated only
once. The C++ Root object already panics if more than one is
created. This change avoids the need to track what the root
object is, since it's available from Root.getInstance() (if it
exists). It's now redundant to have the user pass the root
object to functions like instantiate(), checkpoint(), and
restoreCheckpoint(), so that arg is gone. Users who use
configs/common/Simulate.py should not notice.
The patch creates a specific mesh network where directories are at the corners.
The patch is a good example of how to create an arbitrary network, similar to
the old file specified network, while leveraging scripts and loops when
possible.
Most of these frontend configurations share cache configuration code, pull it out so that
changes to caches don't have to require changing multiple config files.
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).
Based on Steve's suggestion, the ugly if-elif statement and multiple protocol
module import calls are removed and replaced with exec statements using the
protocol string.
Cleaned up the ruby profilers by moving the memory controller profiling code
out of the main profiler object and into a separate object similar to the
current CacheProfiler. Both the CacheProfiler and MemCntrlProfiler are
specific to a particular Ruby object, CacheMemory and MemoryControl
respectively. Therefore, these profilers should not be SimObjects and
created by the python configuration system, but instead private objects. This
simplifies the creation of these profilers.
Reorganized ruby python configuration so that protocol and ruby memory system
configuration code can be shared by multiple front-end configuration files
(i.e. memory tester, full system, and hopefully the regression tester). This
code works for memory tester, but have not tested fs mode.
This patch includes a rather substantial change to the memory controller
profiler in order to work with the new configuration system. Most
noteably, the mem_cntrl_profiler no longer uses a string map, but instead
a vector. Eventually this support should be removed from the main
profiler and go into a separate object. Each memory controller should have
a pointer to that new mem_cntrl profile object.
This patch includes the necessary changes to connect ruby objects using
the python configuration system. Mainly it consists of removing
unnecessary ruby object pointers and connecting the necessary object
pointers using the generated param objects. This patch includes the
slicc changes necessary to connect generated ruby objects together using
the python configuraiton system.
