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.
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.
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.
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.
* EmitXml: Added <ccall>, <constpool>, <initarray>/<inititem>, wrapped children of <if> and <while> with <begin> elements to prevent ambiguity
* EmitXml: added signed="true" to signed basicdtypes
* Add detailed location to XML output
* Fixing build failures
* less cryptic regulary expressions
* correcting typo in test
* Adding file letter to the location attribute, and cleaning up the regular expression in the tests.
* Add remaining test expected output files for XML changes
* spacing fix, adding documentation on changes
Geza Lore
Wilson Snyder
Steven Hugg
Pieter Kapsenberg