tree 5b9d8d396df84a9ed96191e05c197b3828b88990
parent c046e612165e0e76ca2e689521f4e87fc8ab3480
author Boris Shingarov <shingarov@labware.com> 1586291184 -0400
committer Boris Shingarov <shingarov@labware.com> 1625698506 +0000

cpu: Check for instruction-count events before fetch

Instruction fetch should not commence if there already is an
instruction-count event in the queue.

The most conspicuous scenario where this leads to obvious breakage,
is guest debugging.  Imagine the first bytes in the program pointed to
by _start are invalid instruction encoding, and we pass the --wait-gdb
flag.  Then in GDB we set $pc to point to valid instructions, and we
"continue".  gem5 will abort with "invalid instruction".

This is not how real targets behave: neither software- (e.g. ptrace)
based debuggers, nor low-level (e.g. OpenOCD or XMD connected over
JTAG to debug early initialization code eg when the MMU has not been
switched on yet, etc.)  Fetching should start from where $pc was set
to.  This patch tries to model this behavior.

Change-Id: Ibce6fdbbb082edf1073ae96745bc7867878f99ca
Reviewed-on: https://gem5-review.googlesource.com/c/public/gem5/+/27587
Reviewed-by: Jason Lowe-Power <power.jg@gmail.com>
Maintainer: Jason Lowe-Power <power.jg@gmail.com>
Tested-by: kokoro <noreply+kokoro@google.com>