ruby: get rid of RefCnt and Allocator stuff use base/refcnt.hh

This was somewhat tricky because the RefCnt API was somewhat odd.  The
biggest confusion was that the the RefCnt object's constructor that
took a TYPE& cloned the object.  I created an explicit virtual clone()
function for things that took advantage of this version of the
constructor.  I was conservative and used clone() when I was in doubt
of whether or not it was necessary.  I still think that there are
probably too many instances of clone(), but hopefully not too many.

I converted several instances of const MsgPtr & to a simple MsgPtr.
If the function wants to avoid the overhead of creating another
reference, then it should just use a regular pointer instead of a ref
counting ptr.

There were a couple of instances where refcounted objects were created
on the stack.  This seems pretty dangerous since if you ever
accidentally make a reference to that object with a ref counting
pointer, bad things are bound to happen.

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/src/mem/ruby/network/garnet/flexible-pipeline/NetworkInterface.cc b/src/mem/ruby/network/garnet/flexible-pipeline/NetworkInterface.cc
index 697f954ab..c81f5e4b2 100644
--- a/src/mem/ruby/network/garnet/flexible-pipeline/NetworkInterface.cc
+++ b/src/mem/ruby/network/garnet/flexible-pipeline/NetworkInterface.cc
@@ -103,7 +103,8 @@ void NetworkInterface::request_vc(int in_vc, int in_port, NetDest destination, T
 
 bool NetworkInterface::flitisizeMessage(MsgPtr msg_ptr, int vnet)
 {
-        NetworkMessage *net_msg_ptr = dynamic_cast<NetworkMessage*>(msg_ptr.ref());
+        NetworkMessage *net_msg_ptr =
+            safe_cast<NetworkMessage*>(msg_ptr.get());
         NetDest net_msg_dest = net_msg_ptr->getInternalDestination();
         Vector<NodeID> dest_nodes = net_msg_dest.getAllDest(); // gets all the destinations associated with this message.
         int num_flits = (int) ceil((double) m_net_ptr->MessageSizeType_to_int(net_msg_ptr->getMessageSize())/m_net_ptr->getFlitSize() ); // Number of flits is dependent on the link bandwidth available. This is expressed in terms of bytes/cycle or the flit size
@@ -117,10 +118,11 @@ bool NetworkInterface::flitisizeMessage(MsgPtr msg_ptr, int vnet)
                         // did not find a free output vc
                         return false ;
                 }
-                MsgPtr new_msg_ptr = *(msg_ptr.ref());
+                MsgPtr new_msg_ptr = msg_ptr->clone();
                 NodeID destID = dest_nodes[ctr];
 
-                NetworkMessage *new_net_msg_ptr = dynamic_cast<NetworkMessage*>(new_msg_ptr.ref());
+                NetworkMessage *new_net_msg_ptr =
+                    safe_cast<NetworkMessage*>(new_msg_ptr.get());
                 if(dest_nodes.size() > 1)
                 {
                         NetDest personal_dest;