Can you explain how this makes it easier to merge with your changes?

Just so you don't have to merge twice.

If we were to wait for this patch, we would have to merge with Nilay Addr -> addr patch.  Those are the types of patches that are a real pain to deal with.  I think you guys overestimate the amount of people-power we have available to devote to merging.

Brad, I admit that whoever is using ruby and has made edits, would need to devote considerable amount of time and effort to merge with the changes I have made and I am proposing to make.  While I do not want to put any unnecessary burden on anyone,  I think the effort spent would be worthwile because of two reasons:


first and foremost, the simulation performance would improve.  The patches that are currently on the reviewboard would together yield about 25% performance improvement with gem5.prof.  I will very soon propose more changes that would further improve the performance.


second, I think these changes make ruby more stable to work with.  Most of the aspects that I am trying to work on, we have either not touched upon them at all or we went for solutions that (a) do not scale well with increase in simulated system size, (b) are not general enough.  My opinion is that ruby memory system is becoming more coherent in its design choices.