Searched hist:2010 (Results 576 - 600 of 929) sorted by relevance

<<21222324252627282930>>

/gem5/tests/configs/
H A Dmemtest-ruby.pydiff 7570:417ef5d444bd Fri Aug 20 20:44:00 EDT 2010 Brad Beckmann <Brad.Beckmann@amd.com> regress: Regression tester updates

Regression tester updates required by the following patches:

brad/moved_python_protocol_files: config: moved python protocol config files
brad/ruby_options_movement: config: reorganized how ruby specifies command-line options
brad/config_token_bcast: ruby: added token broadcast config params to cmd options
brad/topology_name: config: Added the topology description to m5 config.ini
brad/ruby_system_names: config: Improve ruby simobject names
brad/consolidated_protocol_stats: slicc: Consolidated the protocol stats printing
brad/ruby_request_type_ostream_fix: ruby: Added ruby_request_type ostream def to libruby.hh
brad/memtest_dma_extension: memtest: Memtester support for DMA
brad/token_dma_lockdown_fix: MOESI_CMP_token: Fixed dma persistent lockdown bugs
brad/profile_generic_mach_type: ruby: Reincarnated the responding machine profiling
brad/network_msg_consolidated_stats: ruby: Added consolidated network msg stats
brad/bcast_msg_profiling: ruby: Added bcast msg profiling to hammer and token
brad/l2cache_profiling_fix: ruby: Fixed L2 cache miss profiling
brad/llsc_ruby_m5_fix: ruby: fix ruby llsc support to sync sc outcomes
brad/ruby_latency_fixes: ruby: Reduced ruby latencies
brad/hammer_l2_cache_latency: ruby: Updated MOESI_hammer L2 latency behavior
brad/deterministic_resurrection: ruby: Resurrected Ruby's deterministic tests
brad/token_dma_fixes: ruby: MOESI_CMP_token dma fixes
brad/ruby_cmd_options: config: added cmd options to control ruby debug
brad/token_owner_fixes: ruby: fixed token bugs associated with owner token counts
brad/ruby_remove_try_except: ruby: Improved try except blocks in ruby creation
brad/ruby_port_callback_fix: ruby: Fixed RubyPort sendTiming callbacks
brad/interrupt_drain_fix: devices: Fixed periodic interrupts to work with draining
brad/llsc_trace_profile: ruby: Added SC fail indication to trace profiling
brad/no_migrate_atomic: ruby: Disable migratory sharing for token and hammer
brad/ruby_start_time_fix: ruby: Reset ruby stats in RubySystem unserialize
brad/numa_bit_select_fix: ruby: fixed DirectoryMemory's numa_high_bit configuration
brad/hammer_probe_filter: ruby: added probe filter support to hammer
brad/miss_latency_detail_profile: MOESI_hammer: break down miss latency stalled cycles
brad/recycle_latency_fix: ruby: Recycle latency fix for hammer
brad/stall_and_wait: ruby: Stall and wait input messages instead of recycling
brad/rubytest_request_flag_fix: ruby: Fixed minor bug in ruby test for setting the request type
brad/hammer_merge_gets: ruby: Added merge GETS optimization to hammer
brad/regress_updates: regress: Regression tester updates
diff 7034:6bf327b128c6 Mon Mar 22 00:22:00 EDT 2010 Brad Beckmann <Brad.Beckmann@amd.com> ruby: Regression updates for new ruby config locations
diff 6928:5bd33f7c26ea Fri Jan 29 23:29:00 EST 2010 Brad Beckmann <Brad.Beckmann@amd.com> m5: Regression Tester Update

This patch includes the necessary regression updates to test the new ruby
configuration system. The patch includes support for multiple ruby protocols
and adds the ruby random tester. The patch removes atomic mode test for
ruby since ruby does not support atomic mode acceses. These tests can be
added back in when ruby supports atomic mode for real.
diff 6919:dd45a54732aa Fri Jan 29 23:29:00 EST 2010 Brad Beckmann <Brad.Beckmann@amd.com> ruby: memtest-ruby updated to the new config system
diff 6862:3d308cbd1657 Tue Jan 19 16:48:00 EST 2010 Derek Hower <drh5@cs.wisc.edu> merge
/gem5/src/cpu/o3/
H A Ddyn_inst_impl.hhdiff 7783:9b880b40ac10 Tue Dec 07 19:19:00 EST 2010 Giacomo Gabrielli <Giacomo.Gabrielli@arm.com> O3: Make all instructions that write a misc. register not perform the write until commit.

ARM instructions updating cumulative flags (ARM FP exceptions and saturation
flags) are not serialized.

Added aliases for ARM FP exceptions and saturation flags in FPSCR. Removed
write accesses to the FP condition codes for most ARM VFP instructions: only
VCMP and VCMPE instructions update the FP condition codes. Removed a potential
cause of seg. faults in the O3 model for NEON memory macro-ops (ARM).
diff 7758:28a677d7cb51 Mon Nov 15 15:04:00 EST 2010 Min Kyu Jeong <minkyu.jeong@arm.com> O3: prevent a squash when completeAcc() modifies misc reg through TC.

This happens on ARM instructions when they update the IT state bits.
Code and associated comment was copied from execute() and initiateAcc() methods
diff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
diff 7684:ce48527a3edb Mon Sep 20 05:46:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> CPU: Fix O3 and possible InOrder segfaults in FS.
diff 7678:f19b6a3a8cec Mon Sep 13 22:26:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> Faults: Pass the StaticInst involved, if any, to a Fault's invoke method.

Also move the "Fault" reference counted pointer type into a separate file,
sim/fault.hh. It would be better to name this less similarly to sim/faults.hh
to reduce confusion, but fault.hh matches the name of the type. We could change
Fault to FaultPtr to match other pointer types, and then changing the name of
the file would make more sense.
/gem5/src/arch/arm/linux/
H A Dprocess.ccdiff 7441:be2acdfb8bdc Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Fix SPEC2000 benchmarks in SE mode. With this patch all
Spec2k benchmarks seem to run with atomic or timing mode simple
CPUs. Fixed up some constants, handling of 64 bit arguments,
and marked a few more syscalls ignoreFunc.
diff 7416:e1a7a9f33a00 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: fix sizes of structs for ARM Linux
diff 7414:0a05aa495903 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Fixup native trace support and add some v7/recent stack code
diff 7411:b70c71ac7399 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Implement the getrusage syscall.
diff 7096:e81026b9dfe0 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ARM: Allow ARM processes to start in Thumb mode.
/gem5/src/sim/
H A Dsim_object.hhdiff 7534:c76a14014c27 Tue Aug 17 08:49:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> misc: add some AMD copyright notices
Meant to add these with the previous batch of csets.
diff 7532:3f6413fc37a2 Tue Aug 17 08:17:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: revamp unserialization procedure

Replace direct call to unserialize() on each SimObject with a pair of
calls for better control over initialization in both ckpt and non-ckpt
cases.

If restoring from a checkpoint, loadState(ckpt) is called on each
SimObject. The default implementation simply calls unserialize() if
there is a corresponding checkpoint section, so we get backward
compatibility for existing objects. However, objects can override
loadState() to get other behaviors, e.g., doing other programmed
initializations after unserialize(), or complaining if no checkpoint
section is found. (Note that the default warning for a missing
checkpoint section is now gone.)

If not restoring from a checkpoint, we call the new initState() method
on each SimObject instead. This provides a hook for state
initializations that are only required when *not* restoring from a
checkpoint.

Given this new framework, do some cleanup of LiveProcess subclasses
and X86System, which were (in some cases) emulating initState()
behavior in startup via a local flag or (in other cases) erroneously
doing initializations in startup() that clobbered state loaded earlier
by unserialize().
diff 7527:fe90827a663f Tue Aug 17 08:08:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: move iterating over SimObjects into Python.
diff 7492:acc1fbbef239 Tue Jul 06 00:39:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: fold StartupCallback into SimObject
There used to be a reason to have StartupCallback
be a separate object, but not any more. Now
it's just confusing.
diff 7460:41550bb10e08 Tue Jun 15 02:24:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> stats: get rid of the never-really-used event stuff
H A Dsim_object.ccdiff 7534:c76a14014c27 Tue Aug 17 08:49:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> misc: add some AMD copyright notices
Meant to add these with the previous batch of csets.
diff 7532:3f6413fc37a2 Tue Aug 17 08:17:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: revamp unserialization procedure

Replace direct call to unserialize() on each SimObject with a pair of
calls for better control over initialization in both ckpt and non-ckpt
cases.

If restoring from a checkpoint, loadState(ckpt) is called on each
SimObject. The default implementation simply calls unserialize() if
there is a corresponding checkpoint section, so we get backward
compatibility for existing objects. However, objects can override
loadState() to get other behaviors, e.g., doing other programmed
initializations after unserialize(), or complaining if no checkpoint
section is found. (Note that the default warning for a missing
checkpoint section is now gone.)

If not restoring from a checkpoint, we call the new initState() method
on each SimObject instead. This provides a hook for state
initializations that are only required when *not* restoring from a
checkpoint.

Given this new framework, do some cleanup of LiveProcess subclasses
and X86System, which were (in some cases) emulating initState()
behavior in startup via a local flag or (in other cases) erroneously
doing initializations in startup() that clobbered state loaded earlier
by unserialize().
diff 7527:fe90827a663f Tue Aug 17 08:08:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: move iterating over SimObjects into Python.
diff 7492:acc1fbbef239 Tue Jul 06 00:39:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: fold StartupCallback into SimObject
There used to be a reason to have StartupCallback
be a separate object, but not any more. Now
it's just confusing.
diff 7460:41550bb10e08 Tue Jun 15 02:24:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> stats: get rid of the never-really-used event stuff
/gem5/src/arch/sparc/isa/formats/
H A Dbranch.isadiff 7790:9df469679ac7 Wed Dec 08 03:27:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> SPARC: Take advantage of new PCState syntax.
diff 7741:340b6f01d69b Thu Nov 11 05:03:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> SPARC: Clean up some historical style issues.
diff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
/gem5/src/arch/sparc/
H A Dremote_gdb.ccdiff 7741:340b6f01d69b Thu Nov 11 05:03:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> SPARC: Clean up some historical style issues.
diff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
diff 7678:f19b6a3a8cec Mon Sep 13 22:26:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> Faults: Pass the StaticInst involved, if any, to a Fault's invoke method.

Also move the "Fault" reference counted pointer type into a separate file,
sim/fault.hh. It would be better to name this less similarly to sim/faults.hh
to reduce confusion, but fault.hh matches the name of the type. We could change
Fault to FaultPtr to match other pointer types, and then changing the name of
the file would make more sense.
H A Dtypes.hhdiff 7741:340b6f01d69b Thu Nov 11 05:03:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> SPARC: Clean up some historical style issues.
diff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
/gem5/src/arch/arm/isa/formats/
H A Dbreakpoint.isadiff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
diff 7426:5da64155a605 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ARM: Get rid of the binary dumping function in utility.hh.
7401:9b873c0357b8 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Add BKPT instruction
/gem5/src/arch/mips/
H A Dtlb.ccdiff 7708:956ac83b0a58 Sat Oct 16 03:00:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> Mem: Reclaim some request flags used by MIPS for alignment checking.

These flags were being used to identify what alignment a request needed, but
the same information is available using the request size. This change also
eliminates the isMisaligned function. If more complicated alignment checks are
needed, they can be signaled using the ASI_BITS space in the flags vector like
is currently done with ARM.
diff 7676:92274350b953 Fri Sep 10 17:58:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> style: fix sorting of includes and whitespace in some files
diff 7461:5a07045d0af2 Tue Jun 15 04:18:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> stats: only consider a formula initialized if there is a formula
/gem5/src/arch/arm/
H A Dnativetrace.ccdiff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
diff 7678:f19b6a3a8cec Mon Sep 13 22:26:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> Faults: Pass the StaticInst involved, if any, to a Fault's invoke method.

Also move the "Fault" reference counted pointer type into a separate file,
sim/fault.hh. It would be better to name this less similarly to sim/faults.hh
to reduce confusion, but fault.hh matches the name of the type. We could change
Fault to FaultPtr to match other pointer types, and then changing the name of
the file would make more sense.
diff 7414:0a05aa495903 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Fixup native trace support and add some v7/recent stack code
H A Dmiscregs.ccdiff 7583:665d71561298 Mon Aug 23 12:18:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@arm.com> ARM: Implement some more misc registers
diff 7406:ddc26bd4ea7d Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Some TLB bug fixes.
diff 7405:7a938baf14be Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Move Miscreg functions out of isa.hh
diff 7404:bfc74724914e Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> ARM: Implement the ARM TLB/Tablewalker. Needs performance improvements.
diff 7351:d90afcb8724e Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ARM: Convert the CP15 registers from MPU to MMU.
7259:200840489735 Wed Jun 02 01:58:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ARM: Implement a function to decode CP15 registers to MiscReg indices.
/gem5/src/arch/x86/isa/microops/
H A Dfpop.isadiff 7626:bdd926760470 Mon Aug 23 12:44:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> X86: Get rid of the flagless microop constructor.

This will reduce clutter in the source and hopefully speed up compilation.
diff 7620:3d8a23caa1ef Mon Aug 23 12:44:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> X86: Consolidate extra microop flags into one parameter.

This single parameter replaces the collection of bools that set up various
flavors of microops. A flag parameter also allows other flags to be set like
the serialize before/after flags, etc., without having to change the
constructor.
diff 7087:fb8d5786ff30 Mon May 24 01:44:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> copyright: Change HP copyright on x86 code to be more friendly
/gem5/src/arch/x86/
H A Dprocess.hhdiff 7532:3f6413fc37a2 Tue Aug 17 08:17:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: revamp unserialization procedure

Replace direct call to unserialize() on each SimObject with a pair of
calls for better control over initialization in both ckpt and non-ckpt
cases.

If restoring from a checkpoint, loadState(ckpt) is called on each
SimObject. The default implementation simply calls unserialize() if
there is a corresponding checkpoint section, so we get backward
compatibility for existing objects. However, objects can override
loadState() to get other behaviors, e.g., doing other programmed
initializations after unserialize(), or complaining if no checkpoint
section is found. (Note that the default warning for a missing
checkpoint section is now gone.)

If not restoring from a checkpoint, we call the new initState() method
on each SimObject instead. This provides a hook for state
initializations that are only required when *not* restoring from a
checkpoint.

Given this new framework, do some cleanup of LiveProcess subclasses
and X86System, which were (in some cases) emulating initState()
behavior in startup via a local flag or (in other cases) erroneously
doing initializations in startup() that clobbered state loaded earlier
by unserialize().
diff 7087:fb8d5786ff30 Mon May 24 01:44:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> copyright: Change HP copyright on x86 code to be more friendly
diff 7073:b8f2983a1c88 Mon May 03 03:44:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> X86: Update the base aux vector X86 processes install.
/gem5/src/arch/alpha/
H A Dsystem.ccdiff 7723:ee4ac00d0774 Mon Nov 08 14:58:00 EST 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> sim: Use forward declarations for ports.

Virtual ports need TLB data which means anything touching a file in the arch
directory rebuilds any file that includes system.hh which in everything.
diff 7580:6f77f379a594 Mon Aug 23 12:18:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@arm.com> Loader: Make the load address mask be a parameter of the system rather than a constant.

This allows one two different OS requirements for the same ISA to be handled.
Some OSes are compiled for a virtual address and need to be loaded into physical
memory that starts at address 0, while other bare metal tools generate
images that start at address 0.
diff 7447:3fc243687abb Thu Jun 03 22:41:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> More minor gdb-related cleanup.
Found several more stale includes and forward decls.
H A Dutility.ccdiff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
diff 7707:e5b6f1157be3 Sat Oct 16 02:57:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> GetArgument: Rework getArgument so that X86_FS compiles again.

When no size is specified for an argument, push the decision about what size
to use into the ISA by passing a size of -1.
diff 7693:f1db1000d957 Fri Oct 01 17:02:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> Debug: Implement getArgument() and function skipping for ARM.

In the process make add skipFuction() to handle isa specific function skipping
instead of ifdefs and other ugliness. For almost all ABIs, 64 bit arguments can
only start in even registers. Size is now passed to getArgument() so that 32
bit systems can make decisions about register selection for 64 bit arguments.
The number argument is now passed by reference because getArgument() will need
to change it based on the size of the argument and the current argument number.

For ARM, if the argument number is odd and a 64-bit register is requested the
number must first be incremented to because all 64 bit arguments are passed
in an even argument register. Then the number will be incremented again to
access both halves of the argument.
/gem5/src/python/m5/
H A DSimObject.pydiff 7742:611fe187288e Thu Nov 11 14:41:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> SimObject: Add a comment near clear_child that it's unlikely to be called.
diff 7738:e2e8ca8d9640 Tue Nov 09 13:45:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> SimObject: Use "self" when calling the clear_child method.
diff 7677:c6e283904437 Sun Sep 12 18:41:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> swig: make all generated files go into the m5.internal package

This is necessary because versions of swig older than 1.3.39 fail to
do the right thing and try to do relative imports for everything (even
with the package= option to %module). Instead of putting params in
the m5.internal.params package, put params in the m5.internal package
and make all param modules start with param_. Same thing for
m5.internal.enums.

Also, stop importing all generated params into m5.objects. They are
not necessary and now with everything using relative imports we wound
up with pollution of the namespace (where builtin-range got overridden).
diff 7675:2221ec64132f Thu Sep 09 17:26:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> scons: Stop building the big monolithic swigged params module
kill params.i and create a separate .i for each object (param, enums, etc.)
diff 7673:b28bd1fa9a35 Thu Sep 09 17:15:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> scons: use code_formatter wherever we can in the build system
diff 7534:c76a14014c27 Tue Aug 17 08:49:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> misc: add some AMD copyright notices
Meant to add these with the previous batch of csets.
diff 7528:6efc3672733b Tue Aug 17 08:11:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: clean up child handling
The old code for handling SimObject children was kind of messy,
with children stored both in _values and _children, and
inconsistent and potentially buggy handling of SimObject
vectors. Now children are always stored in _children, and
SimObject vectors are consistently handled using the
SimObjectVector class.

Also, by deferring the parenting of SimObject-valued parameters
until the end (instead of doing it at assignment), we eliminate
the hole where one could assign a vector of SimObjects to a
parameter then append to that vector, with the appended objects
never getting parented properly.

This patch induces small stats changes in tests with data races
due to changes in the object creation & initialization order.
The new code does object vectors in order and so should be more
stable.
diff 7527:fe90827a663f Tue Aug 17 08:08:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: move iterating over SimObjects into Python.
diff 7526:4bb5f5207617 Tue Aug 17 08:06:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: fail on implicit creation of orphans via ports
Orphan SimObjects (not in the config hierarchy) could get
created implicitly if they have a port connection to a SimObject
that is in the hierarchy. This means that there are objects on
the C++ SimObject list (created via the C++ SimObject
constructor call) that are unknown to Python and will get
skipped if we walk the hierarchy from the Python side (as we are
about to do). This patch detects this situation and prints an
error message.

Also fix the rubytester config script which happened to rely on
this behavior.
diff 7525:722f2ad014a7 Tue Aug 17 08:06:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: make Python Root object a singleton
Enforce that the Python Root SimObject is instantiated only
once. The C++ Root object already panics if more than one is
created. This change avoids the need to track what the root
object is, since it's available from Root.getInstance() (if it
exists). It's now redundant to have the user pass the root
object to functions like instantiate(), checkpoint(), and
restoreCheckpoint(), so that arg is gone. Users who use
configs/common/Simulate.py should not notice.
/gem5/configs/common/
H A DSimulation.pydiff 7766:1252ec1c8714 Wed Nov 17 23:16:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> Config: Change misleading "cycle" message to say "tick".

Most of the messages in the config scripts that report a time value already
print "@ tick" followed by the current tick value, but a few were printing
"@ cycle". Since this is a distinction that's frequently confusing to new
users, this changes those message to the more accurate and consistent "@ tick".
diff 7534:c76a14014c27 Tue Aug 17 08:49:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> misc: add some AMD copyright notices
Meant to add these with the previous batch of csets.
diff 7531:f5e86115a07a Tue Aug 17 08:17:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: fold checkpoint restore code into instantiate()
The separate restoreCheckpoint() call is gone; just pass
the checkpoint dir as an optional arg to instantiate().
This change is a precursor to some more extensive
reworking of the startup code.
diff 7530:89b6893554f5 Tue Aug 17 08:17:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> configs: clean up checkpoint code in Simulation.py
Small change to clean up some redundant code.
Should not have any functional impact.
diff 7525:722f2ad014a7 Tue Aug 17 08:06:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> sim: make Python Root object a singleton
Enforce that the Python Root SimObject is instantiated only
once. The C++ Root object already panics if more than one is
created. This change avoids the need to track what the root
object is, since it's available from Root.getInstance() (if it
exists). It's now redundant to have the user pass the root
object to functions like instantiate(), checkpoint(), and
restoreCheckpoint(), so that arg is gone. Users who use
configs/common/Simulate.py should not notice.
diff 7489:26cd0ad262d0 Tue Jul 06 00:39:00 EDT 2010 Steve Reinhardt <steve.reinhardt@amd.com> util: add a script for testing checkpointing
See comments in util/checkpoint-tester.py for details.
/gem5/src/base/
H A Dstatistics.hhdiff 7574:f5742240963f Mon Aug 23 12:18:00 EDT 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> stats: Fix off-by-one error in distributions.

bkt size isn't evenly divisible by max-min and it would round down,
it's possible to sample a distribution and have no place to put the sample.
When this case occured the simulator would assert.
diff 7505:7772a8bf76ee Wed Jul 21 21:54:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> stats: unify the two stats distribution type better
diff 7504:ad631c296c9b Wed Jul 21 18:53:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> stats: cleanup a few small problems in stats
diff 7462:0c61c3cf7639 Tue Jun 15 11:34:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> stats: rename print to display so it work in python
diff 7444:669c1d2df752 Thu Jun 03 14:06:00 EDT 2010 Lisa Hsu <Lisa.Hsu@amd.com> Stats: fix dist stat and enable VectorDistStat
diff 6977:039202aafc0d Tue Feb 23 12:33:00 EST 2010 Lisa Hsu <Lisa.Hsu@amd.com> stats: this makes some fixes to AverageStat and AverageVector.
Also, make Formulas work on AverageVector. First, Stat::Average (and thus
Stats::AverageVector) was broken when coming out of a checkpoint and on resets,
this fixes that. Formulas also didn't work with AverageVector, but added
support for that.
/gem5/src/arch/power/
H A Dtypes.hhdiff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
diff 7680:f4eda002333b Tue Sep 14 03:29:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> CPU: Trim unnecessary includes from some common files.

This reduces the scope of those includes and makes it less likely for there to
be a dependency loop. This also moves the hashing functions associated with
ExtMachInst objects to be with the ExtMachInst definitions and out of
utility.hh.
/gem5/src/arch/alpha/freebsd/
H A Dsystem.ccdiff 7723:ee4ac00d0774 Mon Nov 08 14:58:00 EST 2010 Ali Saidi <Ali.Saidi@ARM.com> sim: Use forward declarations for ports.

Virtual ports need TLB data which means anything touching a file in the arch
directory rebuilds any file that includes system.hh which in everything.
diff 7064:586b0e3a12b3 Thu Apr 15 19:24:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> tick: rename Clock namespace to SimClock
/gem5/src/arch/x86/insts/
H A Dstatic_inst.hhdiff 7720:65d338a8dba4 Sun Oct 31 03:07:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> ISA,CPU,etc: Create an ISA defined PC type that abstracts out ISA behaviors.



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.
diff 7087:fb8d5786ff30 Mon May 24 01:44:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> copyright: Change HP copyright on x86 code to be more friendly
/gem5/src/arch/x86/isa/
H A Dincludes.isadiff 7629:0f0c231e3e97 Mon Aug 23 19:14:00 EDT 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> X86: Create a directory for files that define register indexes.

This is to help tidy up arch/x86. These files should not be used external to
the ISA.
diff 7087:fb8d5786ff30 Mon May 24 01:44:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> copyright: Change HP copyright on x86 code to be more friendly
/gem5/src/mem/ruby/slicc_interface/
H A DRubySlicc_Util.hhdiff 7805:f249937228b5 Thu Dec 23 00:15:00 EST 2010 Nilay Vaish<nilay@cs.wisc.edu> This patch removes the WARN_* and ERROR_* from src/mem/ruby/common/Debug.hh file. These statements have been replaced with warn(), panic() and fatal() defined in src/base/misc.hh
diff 7039:bc0b6ea676b5 Mon Mar 22 21:43:00 EDT 2010 Nathan Binkert <nate@binkert.org> ruby: style pass
/gem5/src/arch/alpha/isa/
H A Dfp.isadiff 7799:5d0f62927d75 Mon Dec 20 16:24:00 EST 2010 Gabe Black <gblack@eecs.umich.edu> Style: Replace some tabs with spaces.
diff 7783:9b880b40ac10 Tue Dec 07 19:19:00 EST 2010 Giacomo Gabrielli <Giacomo.Gabrielli@arm.com> O3: Make all instructions that write a misc. register not perform the write until commit.

ARM instructions updating cumulative flags (ARM FP exceptions and saturation
flags) are not serialized.

Added aliases for ARM FP exceptions and saturation flags in FPSCR. Removed
write accesses to the FP condition codes for most ARM VFP instructions: only
VCMP and VCMPE instructions update the FP condition codes. Removed a potential
cause of seg. faults in the O3 model for NEON memory macro-ops (ARM).

Completed in 254 milliseconds

<<21222324252627282930>>