After conversion of Ast to Dfg, but before synthesizing AstAlways into
primitives, run a pass to remove variables that are not observable, and
all logic that only computes such variables. This can get rid of a lot
of content early so we don't build redundant Dfgs, and also enables
synthesizing always blocks that use temporaries only in some branches,
which will come in a follow up.
Initial idea was to remodel AssignW as Assign under Alway. Trying that
uncovered some issues, the most difficult of them was that a delay
attached to a continuous assignment behaves differently from a delay
attached to a blocking assignment statement, so we need to keep the
knowledge of which flavour an assignment was until V3Timing.
So instead of removing AstAssignW, we always wrap it in an AstAlways,
with a special `keyword()` type. This makes it into a proper procedural
statement, which is almost equivalent to AstAssign, except for the case
when they contain a delay. We still gain the benefits of #6280 and can
simplify some code. Every AstNodeStmt should now be under an
AstNodeProcedure - which we should rename to AstProcess, or an
AstNodeFTask). As a result, V3Table can now handle AssignW for free.
Also uncovered and fixed a bug in handling intra-assignment delays if
a function is present on the RHS of an AssignW.
There is more work to be done towards #6280, and potentially simplifying
AssignW handing, but this is the minimal change required to tick it off
the TODO list for #6280.
Combined Dfg variable elimination into the regularization pass that runs
before converting back to Ast. This avoids introducing some unnecessary
temporaries.
Added replacing of variables with constants in the Ast if after the
Dfg passes they are known to be constants. This is only done in final
scoped Dfg application.
Avoid introducing temporaries for common sub-expressions that are
cheaper to re-compute than store in a temporary variable.
Enable removal of redundant unpacked array variables.
Also fixes#6394 as this patch involved changes to that code.
Added a mini type system for Dfg using DfgDataType to replace Dfg's use
of AstNodeDType. This is much more restricted and represents only the
types Dfg can handle in a canonical form. This will be needed when
adding more support for unpacked arrays and maybe unpacked structs one
day.
Also added an internal type checker for DfgGraphs which encodes all the
assumptions the code makes about type relationships in the graph. Run
this in a few places with --debug-check. Fix resulting fallout.
Large scale refactoring to simplify some of the more obtuse internals of
DFG. Remove multiple redundant internal APIs, simplify representation of
variables, fix potential unsoundness in circular decomposition. No
functional change intended.
This patch adds DfgLogic, which is a vertex that represents a whole,
arbitrarily complex combinational AstAlways or AstAssignW in the
DfgGraph.
Implementing this requires computing the variables live at entry to the
AstAlways (variables read by the block), so there is a new
ControlFlowGraph data structure and a classical data-flow analysis based
live variable analysis to do that at the variable level (as opposed to
bit/element level).
The actual CFG construction and live variable analysis is best effort,
and might fail for currently unhandled constructs or data types. This
can be extended later.
V3DfgAstToDfg is changed to convert the Ast into an initial DfgGraph
containing only DfgLogic, DfgVertexSplice and DfgVertexVar vertices.
The DfgLogic are then subsequently synthesized into primitive operations
by the new V3DfgSynthesize pass, which is a combination of the old
V3DfgAstToDfg conversion and new code to handle AstAlways blocks with
complex flow control.
V3DfgSynthesize by default will synthesize roughly the same constructs
as V3DfgAstToDfg used to handle before, plus any logic that is part of a
combinational cycle within the DfgGraph. This enables breaking up these
cycles, for which there are extensions to V3DfgBreakCycles in this patch
as well. V3DfgSynthesize will then delete all non synthesized or non
synthesizable DfgLogic vertices and the rest of the Dfg pipeline is
identical, with minor changes to adjust for the changed representation.
Because with this change we can now eliminate many more UNOPTFLAT, DFG
has been disabled in all the tests that specifically target testing the
scheduling and reporting of circular combinational logic.
After making a cyclic DFG component acyclic, merge that component back
into the acyclic sub-graph of the input graph. This enables optimizing
through the components that were made acyclic in their larger context.
Store all flags in a DfgVertexVar relating to the underlying
AstVar/AstVarScope stored via AstNode::user1(). user2/user3/user4 are
then usable by DFG algorithms as needed.
Added an algorithm that can break some combinational cycles in DFG, by
attempting to trace driver logic until we escape the cycle. This can
eliminate a decent portion of UNOPTFLAT warnings. E.g. due to this code:
```systemverilog
assign a[0] = .....;
assign a[1] = ~a[0];
```
The DFG peephole pass converts all associative trees into right leaning,
which is good for simplifying pattern recognition, but can lead to an
excessive amount of wide intermediate results being constructed for
right leaning concatenations.
Add a new pass to balance concatenation trees by trying to:
- Create VL_EDATASIZE (32-bit) sub-terms, so words can then be packed
easily afterwards
- Try to ensure the operands of a concat are roughly the same width
within a concatenation tree. This does not yield the shortest tree,
but it ensures it has many sub-nodes that are small enough to fit into
machine registers.
This can eliminate a lot of wide intermediate results, which would need
temporaries, and also increases ILP within sub-expressions (assuming the
C compiler can't figure that out itself).
This is over 2x run-time speedup on the high_perf configuration of
VeeR EH2 (which you could arguably also get with -fno-dfg, but oh well).
This functionality used to be distributed in the removeVars pass and the
final dfgToAst conversion. Instead added a new 'regularize' pass to
convert DFGs into forms that can be trivially converted back to Ast, and
a new 'eliminateVars' pass to remove/repalce redundant variables. This
simplifies dfgToAst significantly and makes the code a bit easier to
follow.
The new 'regularize' pass will ensure that every sub-expression with
multiple uses is assigned to a temporary (unless it's a trivial memory
reference or constant), and will also eliminate or replace redundant
variables. Overall it is a performance neutral change but it does
enable some later improvements which required the graph to be in this
form, and this also happens to be the form required for the dfgToAst
conversion.
With --stats, we will print DFG pattern combinations, one per line, as
S-expressions to new stat files, together with their frequency, to aid
discovery of new peephole patterns.
Apart from the representational changes below, this patch renames
AstNodeMath to AstNodeExpr, and AstCMath to AstCExpr.
Now every expression (i.e.: those AstNodes that represent a [possibly
void] value, with value being interpreted in a very general sense) has
AstNodeExpr as a super class. This necessitates the introduction of an
AstStmtExpr, which represents an expression in statement position, e.g :
'foo();' would be represented as AstStmtExpr(AstCCall(foo)). In exchange
we can get rid of isStatement() in AstNodeStmt, which now really always
represent a statement
Peak memory consumption and verilation speed are not measurably changed.
Partial step towards #3420
Cyclic components are now extracted separately, so there is no
functional reason to have to do a topological sort (previously we used it
to detect cyclic graphs). Removing it to gain some speed.
A lot of optimizations in DFG assume a DAG, but the more things are
representable, the more likely it is that a small cyclic sub-graph is
present in an otherwise very large graph that is mostly acyclic. In
order to avoid loosing optimization opportunities, we explicitly extract
the cyclic sub-graphs (which are the strongly connected components +
anything feeing them, up to variable boundaries) and treat them
separately. This enables optimization of the remaining input.