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This patch takes the final step in removing the InOrderCPU from the
tree. Rest in peace.
The MinorCPU is now used to model an in-order microarchitecture, and
long term the MinorCPU will eventually be renamed InOrderCPU.
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Using '== true' in a boolean expression is totally redundant,
and using '== false' is pretty verbose (and arguably less
readable in most cases) compared to '!'.
It's somewhat of a pet peeve, perhaps, but I had some time
waiting for some tests to run and decided to clean these up.
Unfortunately, SLICC appears not to have the '!' operator,
so I had to leave the '== false' tests in the SLICC code.
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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.
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including IPR accesses and store-conditionals. These class of instructions will not
execute correctly in a superscalar machine
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if a faulting instruction reaches an execution unit,
then ignore it and pass it through the pipeline.
Once we recognize the fault in the graduation unit,
dont allow a second fault to creep in on the same cycle.
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use a dummy instruction to facilitate the squash after
the interrupts trap
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once a ST is sent off, it's OK to keep processing, however it's a little more
complicated to handle the packet acknowledging the store is completed
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only update BTB on a taken branch and update branch predictor w/pcstate from instruction
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only pay attention to branch predictor updates if the the inst. is in fact a branch
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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
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cleanup hanging pointers and other cruft in the destructors
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formerly, to free up bandwidth in a resource, we could just change the pointer in that resource
but at the same time the pipeline stages had visibility to see what happened to a resource request.
Now that we are recycling these requests (to avoid too much dynamic allocation), we can't throw
away the request too early or the pipeline stage gets bad information. Instead, mark when a request
is done with the resource all together and then let the pipeline stage call back to the resource
that it's time to free up the bandwidth for more instructions
*** inteface notes ***
- When an instruction completes and is done in a resource for that cycle, call done()
- When an instruction fails and is done with a resource for that cycle, call done(false)
- When an instruction completes, but isnt finished with a resource, call completed()
- When an instruction fails, but isnt finished with a resource, call completed(false)
* * *
inorder: tlbmiss wakeup bug fix
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take away all instances of reqMap in the code and make all references use the built-in
request vectors inside of each resource. The request map was dynamically allocating
a request per instruction. The request vector just allocates N number of requests
during instantiation and then the surrounding code is fixed up to reuse those N requests
***
setRequest() and clearRequest() are the new accessors needed to define a new
request in a resource
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we are going to be getting away from creating new resource requests for every
instruction so no more need to keep track of a reqRemoveList and clean it up
every tick
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allow the pipeline and resources to use the cached instruction schedule and resource
sked iterator
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Maintain all information about an instruction's fault in the DynInst object rather
than any cpu-request object. Also, if there is a fault during the execution stage
then just save the fault inside the instruction and trap once the instruction
tries to graduate
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allow the user to specify how many instructions a pipeline stage can process
on any given cycle (stageWidth...i.e.bandwidth) by setting the parameter through
the python interface rather than compile the code after changing the *.cc file.
(we always had the parameter there, but still used the static 'ThePipeline::StageWidth'
instead)
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Since StageWidth is now dynamically defined, change the interstage communication
structure to use a vector and get rid of array and array handling index (toNextStageIndex)
since we can just make calls to the list for the same information
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use skidbuffer as only location for instructions between stages. before,
we had the insts queue from the prior stage and the skidbuffer for the
current stage, but that gets confusing and this consolidation helps
when handling squash cases
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manage insertion and deletion like a queue but will need
access to internal elements for future changes
Currently, skidbuffer manages any instruction that was
in a stage but could not complete processing, however
we will want to manage all blocked instructions (from prev stage
and from cur. stage) in just one buffer.
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Previous code was marking CPU activity on almost every cycle due to a bug in
tracking the status of pipeline stages. This disables the CPU from sleeping
on long latency stalls and increases simulation time
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This step makes it easy to replace the accessor functions
(which still access a global variable) with ones that access
per-thread curTick values.
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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.
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remove stall only when necessary
add debugging printfs
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Make sure that instructions are dereferenced/deleted twice by marking they are
on the remove list
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- m5 line enforcement on use_def.cc,hh
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add idle/run/utilization stats for each pipeline stage
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each stage keeps track of insts_processed on a per_thread basis but we should
be keeping that on a total basis inorder to enforce stage width limits
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when threads are switching in/out the CPU, we need to keep
track of special cases like branches. Add appropriate
variables in ThreadState t track this and then use
these variables when updating pc after context switch
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this will be used for when a thread comes back from a cache miss, it needs to update the PCs
because the inst might of been a branch or delayslot in which the next PC isnt always
a straight addition
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allow a thread to wakeup and be activated after
it has been in suspended state and another
thread is switched out. Need to give
pipeline stages a "activateThread" function
so that can get to their suspended instruction
when the time is right.
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-Support ability to activate next ready thread after a cache miss
through the activateNextReadyContext/Thread() functions
-To support this a "readyList" of thread ids is added
-After a cache miss, thread will suspend and then call
activitynextreadythread
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add code to recognize memory stalls in resources and the pipeline as well
as squash a thread if there is a stall and we are in the switch on cache miss
model
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add buffer for instructions to switch out to in a pipeline stage
can't squash the instruction and remove the pipeline so we kind of need
to 'suspend' an instruction at the stage while the memory stall resolves
for the switch on cache miss model
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Changes so that InOrder can work for a non-delay-slot ISA like Alpha. Typically, changes have to do with handling misspeculated branches at different points in pipeline
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a way for the compiler to play *nice*)
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(1)number from 0-n, not 1-n+1, (2) always check nextStageValid before a stageNum+1 and prevStageValid for a stageNum-1 reference (3) add skidSize() to get StageQueue size for all threads
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required for M5 objects; Also, a # of values need to be reset to 0 (or the appropriate value) before we assume they are OK for use.
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generic stages so w/o an ID there is no way to differentiate buffers when debugging
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This model currently only works in MIPS_SE mode, so it will take some effort
to clean it up and make it generally useful. Hopefully people are willing to
help make that happen!
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