sim: tag-based checkpoint versioning

This commit addresses gem5 checkpoints' linear versioning bottleneck.
Since development is distributed across many private trees, there exists
a sort of 'race' for checkpoint version numbers: internally a checkpoint
version may be used but then resynchronizing with the external tree causes
a conflict on that version.  This change replaces the linear version number
with a set of unique strings called tags.  Now the only conflicts that can
arise are of tag names, where collisions are much easier to avoid.

The checkpoint upgrader (util/cpt_upgrader.py) upgrades the version
representation, as one would expect. Each tag version implements its
upgrader code in a python file in the util/cpt_upgraders directory
rather than adding a function to the upgrader script itself.

The version tags are stored in the 'Globals' section rather than 'root'
(as the version was previously) because 'Globals' gets unserialized
first and can provide a warning before any other unserialization errors
can occur.

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/SConscript b/src/SConscript
index 95c8f002f..eae03a98a 100755
--- a/src/SConscript
+++ b/src/SConscript
@@ -916,6 +916,11 @@ env.Command('debug/flags.cc', Value(debug_flags),
 env.Depends(SWIG, 'debug/flags.cc')
 Source('debug/flags.cc')
 
+# version tags
+env.Command('sim/tags.cc', None,
+            MakeAction('util/cpt_upgrader.py --get-cc-file > $TARGET',
+                       Transform("VER TAGS")))
+
 # Embed python files.  All .py files that have been indicated by a
 # PySource() call in a SConscript need to be embedded into the M5
 # library.  To do that, we compile the file to byte code, marshal the