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This patch adds the necessary commands and cache functionality to
allow clean writebacks. This functionality is crucial, especially when
having exclusive (victim) caches. For example, if read-only L1
instruction caches are not sending clean writebacks, there will never
be any spills from the L1 to the L2. At the moment the cache model
defaults to not sending clean writebacks, and this should possibly be
re-evaluated.
The implementation of clean writebacks relies on a new packet command
WritebackClean, which acts much like a Writeback (renamed
WritebackDirty), and also much like a CleanEvict. On eviction of a
clean block the cache either sends a clean evict, or a clean
writeback, and if any copies are still cached upstream the clean
evict/writeback is dropped. Similarly, if a clean evict/writeback
reaches a cache where there are outstanding MSHRs for the block, the
packet is dropped. In the typical case though, the clean writeback
allocates a block in the downstream cache, and marks it writable if
the evicted block was writable.
The patch changes the O3_ARM_v7a L1 cache configuration and the
default L1 caches in config/common/Caches.py
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This patch adds a parameter to control the cache clusivity, that is if
the cache is mostly inclusive or exclusive. At the moment there is no
intention to support strict policies, and thus the options are: 1)
mostly inclusive, or 2) mostly exclusive.
The choice of policy guides the behaviuor on a cache fill, and a new
helper function, allocOnFill, is created to encapsulate the decision
making process. For the timing mode, the decision is annotated on the
MSHR on sending out the downstream packet, and in atomic we directly
pass the decision to handleFill. We (ab)use the tempBlock in cases
where we are not allocating on fill, leaving the rest of the cache
unaffected. Simple and effective.
This patch also makes it more explicit that multiple caches are
allowed to consider a block writable (this is the case
also before this patch). That is, for a mostly inclusive cache,
multiple caches upstream may also consider the block exclusive. The
caches considering the block writable/exclusive all appear along the
same path to memory, and from a coherency protocol point of view it
works due to the fact that we always snoop upwards in zero time before
querying any downstream cache.
Note that this patch does not introduce clean writebacks. Thus, for
clean lines we are essentially removing a cache level if it is made
mostly exclusive. For example, lines from the read-only L1 instruction
cache or table-walker cache are always clean, and simply get dropped
rather than being passed to the L2. If the L2 is mostly exclusive and
does not allocate on fill it will thus never hold the line. A follow
on patch adds the clean writebacks.
The patch changes the L2 of the O3_ARM_v7a CPU configuration to be
mostly exclusive (and stats are affected accordingly).
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Open up for other subclasses to BaseCache and transition to using the
explicit Cache subclass.
--HG--
rename : src/mem/cache/BaseCache.py => src/mem/cache/Cache.py
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