V3MergeCond merges consecutive conditional `_ = cond ? _ : _` and
`if (cond) ...` statements. This patch adds an analysis and ordering
phase that moves statements with identical conditions closer to each
other, in order to enable more merging opportunities. This in turn
eliminates a lot of repeated conditionals which reduced dynamic branch
count and branch misprediction rate. Observed 6.5% improvement on
multi-threaded large designs, at the cost of less than 2% increase in
Verilation speed.
- 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.
A separate V3VariableOrder pass is now used to order module variables
before Emit. All variables are now ordered together, without
consideration for whether they are ports, signals form the design, or
additional internal variables added by Verilator (which used to be
ordered and emitted as separate groups in Emit). For single threaded
models, this is performance neutral. For multi-threaded models, the
MTask affinity based sorting was slightly modified, so variables with no
MTask affinity are emitted last, otherwise the MTask affinity sets are
sorted using the TSP sorter as before, but again, ports, signals, and
internal variables are not differentiated. This yields a 2%+ speedup for
the multithreaded model on OpenTitan.
These utility classes can be used to hang advanced data structures off
AstNode user*u() pointers, and they take care of memory management for
the client. Use via the call operator().
Geza Lore
Wilson Snyder