This patch adds the ability for an application to request dist-gem5 to begin/
end synchronization using an m5 op. When toggling on sync, all nodes agree
on the next sync point based on the maximum of all nodes' ticks. CPUs are
suspended until the sync point to avoid sending network messages until sync has
been enabled. Toggling off sync acts like a global execution barrier, where
all CPUs are disabled until every node reaches the toggle off point. This
avoids tricky situations such as one node hitting a toggle off followed by a
toggle on before the other nodes hit the first toggle off.
Currently, all the network devices create a 16K buffer for the 'data' field
in EthPacketData, and use 'length' to keep track of the size of the packet
in the buffer. This patch introduces the 'simLength' parameter to
EthPacketData, which is used to hold the effective length of the packet used
for all timing calulations in the simulator. Serialization is performed using
only the useful data in the packet ('length') and not necessarily the entire
original buffer.
Distributed gem5 (abbreviated dist-gem5) is the result of the
convergence effort between multi-gem5 and pd-gem5 (from Univ. of
Wisconsin). It relies on the base multi-gem5 infrastructure for packet
forwarding, synchronisation and checkpointing but combines those with
the elaborated network switch model from pd-gem5.
--HG--
rename : src/dev/net/multi_etherlink.cc => src/dev/net/dist_etherlink.cc
rename : src/dev/net/multi_etherlink.hh => src/dev/net/dist_etherlink.hh
rename : src/dev/net/multi_iface.cc => src/dev/net/dist_iface.cc
rename : src/dev/net/multi_iface.hh => src/dev/net/dist_iface.hh
rename : src/dev/net/multi_packet.hh => src/dev/net/dist_packet.hh
