Thanks, Timothy!  This looks like a great addition and I really
appreciate your effort to contribute your changes back.

I did several comments on reviewboard, but rather than flood the list
with a bunch of "ship it!" comments, I'll just say here that
everything I didn't comment on looks good to me.

I'm sure Nate will have something to say as well, particularly about
the stats backup/restore code.

Steve

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Timothy M Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've just posted to the review board 12 patches that enable me to perform
> SMARTS-like sampling simulation.  Most are finished and I'd be happy to
> commit them if everyone is ok with them.  A couple are not quite there yet
> and I'd like input on whether they are correct and whether I'm doing things
> in the best way.
>
> To summarise what I've done:
>
> 1) Taken the branch predictor out of O3CPU and made it a stand-alone
> SimObject that is accessible from python;
>
> 2) Added functionality to the simple CPUs to allow them to warm the branch
> predictor;
>
> 3) Altered the takeOverFrom functions so that CPU memory is always connected
> up if required.  Also provided functions to mark all cache data as ready
> which is required after functional warming;
>
> 4) Provided functions available in python to get the number of instructions
> executed by each CPU and to set the maximum number to execute for the next
> phase;
>
> 5) Provided the ability to backup and restore stats so that they are not
> counted during the warming up phase;
>
> 6) Altered the example simulation scripts so that folk can see how I am
> simulating like this and do it themselves;
>
> 7) Made various bug fixes and alterations to correct corner cases I found
> when implementing this stuff.
>
> I'm not so sure about 1) and it would be good to get Kevin's input on that.
>  I hope to extend it to make one generic branch predictor so that the
> in-order core can make use of it too, instead of having it's own, duplicated
> code.
>
> I'm also not so sure about the backing up and restoring of stats.  I've not
> implemented this in all of the classes and I'm not 100% sure what's going
> on, so this is a kind of stab-in-the-dark.  Nate, if you could give me
> feedback on what is right and wrong here, or if there's a better approach,
> that would be much appreciated.
>
> In general, if there are any glaring errors or things I haven't thought
> about, please let me know.
>
> All these patches should apply with no problems (in the order they're posted
> on the review board) and you can try out the sampling for yourselves too :-)
>
> Cheers
> Tim
>
> --
> Timothy M. Jones
> http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/tjones1
>
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>
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>
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