On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Ali Saidi <[email protected]> wrote: > > The reason for the ISA object was to have a location where CPU > specific features could be configured. Previously some of this was done > in the XXXXXSystem Object, however that has a couple of issues > associated with it. The biggest one is that there is only one system > object and possibly multiple CPUs. If you need to give CPUs traits like > CPU IDs that have a specific NUMA-like meaning or want to configure CPUs > to report themselves to the kernel in different ways (e.g. big.LITTLE so > the kernel can make intelligent scheduling decisions), there isn't a way > to do this in that framework. The other reason is that it's quite ugly > to go spelunking in the TC, to get a system pointer and then dynamically > cast it to a architecture specific system pointer to get at what a the > value of a miscellaneous register should be. >
I understand the motivation and am not opposed in principle... and I missed the window for discussion by not paying enough attention to reviewboard. My concerns are relatively shallow, just that (1) as a SimObject, the name is not that great and (2) now that it is a SimObject, it looks like it might be useful for it to have a pointer back to the CPU (really thread context) it belongs to. Steve _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list [email protected] http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
