The --prof-threads option has been split into two independent options:
1. --prof-exec, for collecting verilator_gantt and other execution
related profiling data, and
2. --prof-pgo, for collecting data needed for PGO
The implementation of execution profiling is extricated from
VlThreadPool and is now a separate class VlExecutionProfiler. This means
--prof-exec can now be used for single-threaded models (though it does
not measure a lot of things just yet). For consistency VerilatedProfiler
is renamed VlPgoProfiler. Both VlExecutionProfiler and VlPgoProfiler are
in verilated_profiler.{h/cpp}, but can be used completely independently.
Also re-worked the execution profile format so it now only emits events
without holding onto any temporaries. This is in preparation for some
future optimizations that would be hindered by the introduction of function
locals via AstText.
Also removed the Barrier event. Clearing the profile buffers is not
notably more expensive as the profiling records are trivially
destructible.
- Always use a fast function to replace a slow one if available
- Iterate to fixed point (i.e.: if combining made more functions
identical, combine those too). This will be more useful in the future.
- Use only single, const traversal
Introduce VNRef that can be used to wrap AstNode keys in STL
collections, resulting in equality comparisons rather than identity
comparisons. This can then replace the SenTreeSet data-structure.
Using the 'forceable' directive in a configuration file, or the /*
verilator forceable */ metacomment on a variable declaration will
generate additional public signals that allow the specified signals to
be forced/released from the C++ code.
- Add more tests, including for tracing.
- Apply some cleaner, more generic abstractions in the implementation.
- Use clearer AstRelease which is not an assignment.
Avoid cloning the module when inlining the last instance that references
that module. This saves a lot of memory because it saves cloning
singleton modules (those with a single instance), which we always
inline. The top few levels of the hierarchy are often simple wrappers,
including the one added by Verilator in V3LinkLevel::wrapTop. Cloning
these and putting off deleting the originals can be very expensive
because they often have a lot of contents inlined into them, so each
layer of wrapper that is inlined would essentially add a whole new clone
of the large top-level. Directly inlining the module for the last cell
without cloning saves us from all this duplicate memory consumption and
also from having to create the clones in the first place.
Also added minor traversal speedups
This reduces the memory consumption of V3Inline by 80% and peak memory
consumption of Verilator by about 66% on a large design, while speeding
up the V3Inline pass by ~3.5x and the whole of Verilator by ~8% while
producing identical output.
- More efficient comparison by pre-computing sorting keys.
- Remove work items in algorithms known to be redundant earlier.
This greatly reduces data structure sizes.
- Use V3GraphVertex->user() for state tracking instead of unordered_map
while both of these are constant time, they do add up.
- In `makeMinSpanningTree`, instead of batch inserting outgoing edges of
each visited vertex into an ordered set, keep an ordered set of sorted
vectors of edges. This reduces the size of the ordered set
significantly (it is now O(V) rather than O(E), and as the subject
graph is a complete graph, V ~ sqrt(E), so this is a significant gain).
- Use a vector + sorting in `perfectMatching` instead of an ordered set.
This is faster on large working sets.
This yields 3.8x speedup on the variable order pass and overall 14%
verilation speed gain on a large design.
Repeatedly traversing whole modules in emit (due to file splitting)
looking for `systemc_* sections can add up to a lot of time on large
designs that have been flattened and need to be split into many files.
Assuming `systemc_* is a rarely used feature, just don't bother if we
don't need to. This gain 9% verilation speed improvement on a large
benchmark.