Convert trace buffer to 32-bit entries, rather than a union containing a
pointer type. Also tweaked trace entry layouts for a bit more
performance. This gains another 10% on SweRV EH1 CoreMark.
- Change templated trace routines to branch table.
Removed templating from trace chgBus and fullBus and replaced them with
a branch table like the other there is a very small (< 1%) penalty for
this on SwerRV EH1 CoreMark, but this is less than the variability of
disk IO so it's worth it to keep the code simpler and smaller.
- Prefetch VCD suffix buffer at the top of emit*
- Increase ILP in VCD emit* routines
- Use a 64-bit unaligned store to emit the VCD suffix (on x86 only)
The performance difference with these is very small, but the changes
hopefully make this code more performance-portable across various
micro-architectures.
VerilatedVcdC::openNext() failed to flush the tracing thread before
opening the next output file, which caused t_trace_cat.pl to fail
with --vltmt on occasion.
We used to include a .cpp file on the link line for the shared library,
which was ignored, but generated a .d file for the .so which contained
the header files required by the .cpp file. This then caused a rebuild
where we included the .d in verilated.mk to included in the .h headers
among the prerequisites of the .so, yielding a clang error about treating
.h files as c++-header rather than c-header... Long story short, we don't
do that anymore. This used t cause t_a4_examples to fail on occasion.
Note there is no need for a separate compilation rule for the
<--protect-lib>.cpp, as it will jsut pick up the standard OPT_FAST rule.
- Packaged SystemC lives in /usr so needed to update regex in test
driver
- Clang 10 complains about mixed named and positional initializers in
struct definitions.
The --trace-threads option can now be used to perform tracing on a
thread separate from the main thread when using VCD tracing (with
--trace-threads 1). For FST tracing --trace-threads can be 1 or 2, and
--trace-fst --trace-threads 1 is the same a what --trace-fst-threads
used to be (which is now deprecated).
Performance numbers on SweRV EH1 CoreMark, clang 6.0.0, Intel i7-3770 @
3.40GHz, IO to ramdisk, with numactl set to schedule threads on different
physical cores. Relative speedup:
--trace -> --trace --trace-threads 1 +22%
--trace-fst -> --trace-fst --trace-threads 1 +38% (as --trace-fst-thread)
--trace-fst -> --trace-fst --trace-threads 2 +93%
Speed relative to --trace with no threaded tracing:
--trace 1.00 x
--trace --trace-threads 1 0.82 x
--trace-fst 1.79 x
--trace-fst --trace-threads 1 1.23 x
--trace-fst --trace-threads 2 0.87 x
This means FST tracing with 2 extra threads is now faster than single
threaded VCD tracing, and is on par with threaded VCD tracing. You do
pay for it in total compute though as --trace-fst --trace-threads 2 uses
about 240% CPU vs 150% for --trace-fst --trace-threads 1, and 155% for
--trace --trace threads 1. Still for interactive use it should be
helpful with large designs.
This patch de-duplicates common functionality between the VCD and FST
trace implementation. It also enables adding new trace formats more
easily and consistently.
No functional nor performance change intended.
The FST trace timescale used to be set in the constructor via
set_time_unit, but at that point we haven't normally opened the
file yet so it was just dropped. On top of that, we actually want
to use set_time_resolution... FST trace timescales now match the VCD.
If the first dump was not at time zero, then the FST trace used
to contain the initial values as if they were set at time zero. Now
they only appear at the time the first dump call is actually made,
and hence match the VCD trace exactly.
Wilson Snyder
Geza Lore
Qingyao Sun
James Hanlon
Veripool API Bot