The only use for the clocker attribute and the AstVar::isUsedClock that
is actually necessary today for correctness is to mark top level inputs
of --lib-create blocks as being (or driving) a clock signal. Correctness
of --lib-create (and hence hierarchical blocks) actually used to depend
on having the right optimizations eliminate intermediate clocks (e.g.:
V3Gate), when the top level port was not used directly in a sensitivity
list, or marking top level signals manually via --clk or the clocker
attribute. However V3Sched::partition already needs to trace through the
logic to figure out what signals might drive a sensitivity list, so it
can very easily mark all top level inputs as such.
In this patch we remove the AstVar::attrClocker and AstVar::isUsedClock
attributes, and replace them with AstVar::isPrimaryClock, automatically
set by V3Sched::partition. This eliminates all need for manual
annotation so we are deprecating the --clk/--no-clk options and the
clocker/no_clocker attributes.
This also eliminates the opportunity for any further mis-optimization
similar to #6453.
Regarding the other uses of the removed AstVar attributes:
- As of 5.000, initial edges are triggered via a separate mechanism
applied in V3Sched, so the use in V3EmitCFunc.cpp is redundant
- Also as of 5.000, we can handle arbitrary sensitivity expressions, so
the restriction on eliminating clock signals in V3Gate is unnecessary
- Since the recent change when Dfg is applied after V3Scope, it does
perform the equivalent of GateClkDecomp, so we can delete that pass.
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.
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];
```
These passes blow up the Ast size on some designs, so delaying running V3Const
until after the whole pass can notably increase peak memory usage. In this
patch we apply V3Const per CFunc within these passes, which saves on memory.
Added -fno-const-eager to disable the intra-pass V3Const application, for
debugging.
This patch adds a heuristic to V3SplitVar, and it attempts to split up
packed variables that are only referenced via constant index,
non-overlapping bit/range selects. This can eliminate some UNOPTFLAT cases.
Add a new pass to split up (recursively):
foo = {l, r};
into the following, with the right indices, iff the concatenation
straddles a wide word boundary.
foo[_:_] = r;
foo[_:_] = l;
This eliminates more wide temporaries.
Another 23% speedup on VeeR EH2 high_perf. Also brings the predicted
stack size from 8M to 40k.
Since we removed --threads 0 support, the 'threads()' option always
returns a value >= 1. Remove corresponding dead code.
Some of the coverage counters appear to use atomics even if the model is
single threaded. I'm under the impression this was a bug originally so
those ones I changed to use threads() > 1 instead.
Also added a testing only -fno-const-before-dfg option, as otherwise
V3Const eats up a lot of the simple inputs. A lot of the things V3Const
swallows in the simple cases can make it to DFG in complex cases, or DFG
itself can create them during optimization. In any case to save
complexity of testing DFG constant folding, we use this option to turn
off V3Const prior to the DFG passes in the relevant test.
Added a new data-flow graph (DFG) based combinational logic optimizer.
The capabilities of this covers a combination of V3Const and V3Gate, but
is also more capable of transforming combinational logic into simplified
forms and more.
This entail adding a new internal representation, `DfgGraph`, and
appropriate `astToDfg` and `dfgToAst` conversion functions. The graph
represents some of the combinational equations (~continuous assignments)
in a module, and for the duration of the DFG passes, it takes over the
role of AstModule. A bulk of the Dfg vertices represent expressions.
These vertex classes, and the corresponding conversions to/from AST are
mostly auto-generated by astgen, together with a DfgVVisitor that can be
used for dynamic dispatch based on vertex (operation) types.
The resulting combinational logic graph (a `DfgGraph`) is then optimized
in various ways. Currently we perform common sub-expression elimination,
variable inlining, and some specific peephole optimizations, but there
is scope for more optimizations in the future using the same
representation. The optimizer is run directly before and after inlining.
The pre inline pass can operate on smaller graphs and hence converges
faster, but still has a chance of substantially reducing the size of the
logic on some designs, making inlining both faster and less memory
intensive. The post inline pass can then optimize across the inlined
module boundaries. No optimization is performed across a module
boundary.
For debugging purposes, each peephole optimization can be disabled
individually via the -fno-dfg-peepnole-<OPT> option, where <OPT> is one
of the optimizations listed in V3DfgPeephole.h, for example
-fno-dfg-peephole-remove-not-not.
The peephole patterns currently implemented were mostly picked based on
the design that inspired this work, and on that design the optimizations
yields ~30% single threaded speedup, and ~50% speedup on 4 threads. As
you can imagine not having to haul around redundant combinational
networks in the rest of the compilation pipeline also helps with memory
consumption, and up to 30% peak memory usage of Verilator was observed
on the same design.
Gains on other arbitrary designs are smaller (and can be improved by
analyzing those designs). For example OpenTitan gains between 1-15%
speedup depending on build type.
- Rename `--dump-treei` option to `--dumpi-tree`, which itself is now a
special case of `--dumpi-<tag>` where tag can be a magic word, or a
filename
- Control dumping via static `dump*()` functions, analogous to `debug()`
- Make dumping independent of the value of `debug()` (so dumping always
works even without the debug flag)
- Add separate `--dumpi-graph` for dumping V3Graphs, which is again a
special case of `--dumpi-<tag>`
- Alias `--dump-<tag>` to `--dumpi-<tag> 3` as before
Geza Lore
Wilson Snyder
Bartłomiej Chmiel
Andrew Voznytsa
Mateusz Gancarz
Kamil Rakoczy
Todd Strader
Krzysztof Bieganski
Andrew Nolte
Bartłomiej Chmiel
Mariusz Glebocki
Markus Krause
Ryan Ziegler
Alex Solomatnikov
Arkadiusz Kozdra
Paul Wright
Yutetsu TAKATSUKASA
Szymon Gizler
Szymon Gizler
Mariusz Glebocki
Ethan Sifferman
Frans Skarman
Krzysztof Boronski
Don Williamson
Andrew Nolte
Kritik Bhimani
Aleksander Kiryk
Larry Doolittle
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Marcel Chang
Kanad Kanhere