| Age | Commit message (Collapse) | Author |
|---|
|
This patch changes MessageBuffer and TimerTable, two structures used for
buffering messages by components in ruby. These structures would no longer
maintain pointers to clock objects. Functions in these structures have been
changed to take as input current time in Tick. Similarly, these structures
will not operate on Cycle valued latencies for different operations. The
corresponding functions would need to be provided with these latencies by
components invoking the relevant functions. These latencies should also be
in Ticks.
I felt the need for these changes while trying to speed up ruby. The ultimate
aim is to eliminate Consumer class and replace it with an EventManager object in
the MessageBuffer and TimerTable classes. This object would be used for
scheduling events. The event itself would contain information on the object and
function to be invoked.
In hindsight, it seems I should have done this while I was moving away from use
of a single global clock in the memory system. That change led to introduction
of clock objects that replaced the global clock object. It never crossed my
mind that having clock object pointers is not a good design. And now I really
don't like the fact that we have separate consumer, receiver and sender
pointers in message buffers.
|
|
These were not generating the correct c names for types declared within a
machine scope.
|
|
This patch transitions the Ruby Message and its derived classes from
the ad-hoc RefCountingPtr to the c++11 shared_ptr. There are no
changes in behaviour, and the code modifications are mainly replacing
"new" with "make_shared".
The cloning of derived messages is slightly changed as they previously
relied on overriding the base-class through covariant return types.
|
|
As of now, the enqueue statement can take in any number of 'pairs' as
argument. But we only use the pair in which latency is the key. This
latency is allowed to be either a fixed integer or a member variable of
controller in which the expression appears. This patch drops the use of pairs
in an enqueue statement. Instead, an expression is allowed which will be
interpreted to be the latency of the enqueue. This expression can anything
allowed by slicc including a constant integer or a member variable.
|
|
This patch allows ruby to have multiple clock domains. As I understand
with this patch, controllers can have different frequencies. The entire
network needs to run at a single frequency.
The idea is that with in an object, time is treated in terms of cycles.
But the messages that are passed from one entity to another should contain
the time in Ticks. As of now, this is only true for the message buffers,
but not for the links in the network. As I understand the code, all the
entities in different networks (simple, garnet-fixed, garnet-flexible) should
be clocked at the same frequency.
Another problem is that the directory controller has to operate at the same
frequency as the ruby system. This is because the memory controller does
not make use of the Message Buffer, and instead implements a buffer of its
own. So, it has no idea of the frequency at which the directory controller
is operating and uses ruby system's frequency for scheduling events.
|
|
The patch started of with replacing Time with Cycles in the Consumer class.
But to get ruby to compile, the rest of the changes had to be carried out.
Subsequent patches will further this process, till we completely replace
Time with Cycles.
|
|
This patch was initiated so as to remove reference to g_system_ptr,
the pointer to Ruby System that is used for getting the current time.
That simple change actual requires changing a lot many things in slicc and
garnet. All these changes are related to how time is handled.
In most of the places, g_system_ptr has been replaced by another clock
object. The changes have been done under the assumption that all the
components in the memory system are on the same clock frequency, but the
actual clocks might be distributed.
|
|
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.
|
|
This is simply a translation of the C++ slicc into python with very minimal
reorganization of the code. The output can be verified as nearly identical
by doing a "diff -wBur".
Slicc can easily be run manually by using util/slicc
|
