Speed improvements:
- Use a direct, recursion-free implementation
- Improve pre-fetching
Functionality:
- Support remove/replace of currently iterated node
This is a major re-design of the way code is scheduled in Verilator,
with the goal of properly supporting the Active and NBA regions of the
SystemVerilog scheduling model, as defined in IEEE 1800-2017 chapter 4.
With this change, all internally generated clocks should simulate
correctly, and there should be no more need for the `clock_enable` and
`clocker` attributes for correctness in the absence of Verilator
generated library models (`--lib-create`).
Details of the new scheduling model and algorithm are provided in
docs/internals.rst.
Implements #3278
Rename AstNodeModule::hierName -> someInstanceName and explain that this
is only used for user messages.
Rename AstNode::locationStr -> instanceStr and simplify implementation.
In particular, do not report an instance if we can't find a reasonable
guess.
- 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.
IEEE 1800-2017 6.11.3 says these types are unsigned. Until now these
types were treated as not having a signedness (NOSIGN), and nodes having
these types were later resolved by V3Width to be unsigned. This is a bit
problematic when creating nodes of these types after V3Width. Treating
these types as unsigned from the get go is fine, and actually improves
generated code slightly.
This is a partial cleanup of V3Order with the aim of increasing clarity:
- Split the initial OrderGraph building and the actual ordering process
into separate classes (OrderVisitor -> OrderBuildVisitor + OrderProcess)
- Remove all the historical cruft from the graph building phase (now in
OrderBuildVisitor), and add more assertions for assumptions.
- Change the dot styling of OrderGraph to use shapes and more easily
distinguishable colors.
- Expand vague comments, remove incorrect comments, and add more.
- Replace some old code with cleaner C++11 constructs.
- Move code about a bit so logically connected sections are closer to
each other, scope some definitions where they are used rather than file
scope.
- The actual ordering process (now in OrderProcess) is still largely
unchanged.
The generated code is identical to before (within the limits of the
exiting non-determinism).
The _CONST suffix on these macros is only lexical notation, pointer
constness can be preserved by overloading the underlying
implementations appropriately. Given that the compiler will catch
invalid const usage (trying to assign a non-const pointer to a const
pointer variable, etc.), and that the declarations of symbols should
make their constness obvious, I see no reason to keep the _CONST
flavours.
Fail at compile time if the result of these macros can be statically
determined (i.e.: they aways succeed or always fail). Remove unnecessary
casts discovered. No functional change.
VN_AS should be used over VN_CAST in code where the author knows up
front (i.e.: statically) what the true type of the node is. This has
multiple benefits over VN_CAST:
- In the debug build: Asserts node type is as expected
- In the optimized build: It is faster as no superfluous type test
- And (I would argue most importantly) it documents intent in the code
No current instances of VN_CAST changed in this patch
All parameters that are required in the output are now emitted as
'static constexpr, except for string or array of strings parameters,
which are still emitted as 'static const' (required as std::string is
not a literal type, so cannot be constexpr). This simplifies handling
of parameters and supports 'real' parameters.
Other sub-classes of AstNodeCCall do not need the self pointer. Moving
it into the specific sub-class that needs it clarifies V3Descope and
Emit. No functional change intended.
This patch makes OpenTitan verilation with --debug-check 22% faster, and
the same with --debug --no-dump-tree 91% faster. Functionality is the
same (including when VL_LEAK_CHECKS is defined), except V3Broken can now
always find duplicate references via child/next pointers if the target
node is not `maybePointedTo()` (previously this only happened when
compiled with VL_LEAK_CHECKS). The main change relates to storing the
v3Broken traversal state in the AstNode by stealing a byte from what
used to be unused flags. We retain an unordered_set only for marking
pointers as valid to be referenced via a non-child/non-next member
pointer.
The bool AstNode flags fit in a padding gap after m_type. This reduces
memory consumption by about 2% on OpenTitan. Initializing the unused
bits in the flags then avoids a read-modify-write in the constructor
(replacing it with a store constant). Overall verilation speed is about
1% faster.
Remove magic code fragments form EmitCTrace, so Emit need not be aware
that a function is tracing related or not (apart from the purpose of
file name generation). All necessary code is now generated via text
nodes in V3TraceDecl and V3Trace. No functional change intended.
This patch implements #3032. Verilator creates a module representing the
SystemVerilog $root scope (V3LinkLevel::wrapTop). Until now, this was
called the "TOP" module, which also acted as the user instantiated model
class. Syms used to hold a pointer to this root module, but hold
instances of any submodule. This patch renames this root scope module
from "TOP" to "$root", and introduces a separate model class which is
now an interface class. As the root module is no longer the user
interface class, it can now be made an instance of Syms, just like any
other submodule. This allows absolute references into the root module to
avoid an additional pointer indirection resulting in a potential speedup
(about 1.5% on OpenTitan). The model class now also contains all non
design specific generated code (e.g.: eval loops, trace config, etc),
which additionally simplifies Verilator internals.
Please see the updated documentation for the model interface changes.
Teach V3Localize how to localize variables that are used in multiple
functions, if in all functions where they are used, they are always
written in whole before being consumed. This allows a lot more variables
to be localized (+20k variables on OpenTitan - when building without
--trace), and can cause significant performance improvement (OpenTitan
simulates 8.5% - build single threaded and withuot --trace).
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().
V3Localize can now localize variable references that reference variables
located in scopes different from the referencing function. This also
means V3Descope has now moved after V3Localize.
The goal of this patch is to move functionality related to constructing
the thread entry points and then invoking them out of V3EmitC (and into
V3Partition). The long term goal being enabling V3EmitC to emit
functions partitioned based on header dependencies. V3EmitC having to
deal with only AstCFunc instances and no other magic will facilitate
this.
In this patch:
- We construct AstCFuncs for each thread entry point in
V3Partition::finalize and move AstMTaskBody nodes under these functions.
- Add the invocation of the threads as text statements within the
AstExecGraph, so they are still invoked where the exec graph is located.
(the entry point functions are still referenced via AstCCall or
AstAddOrCFunc, so lazy declarations of referenced functions are created
automatically).
- Explicitly handle MTask state variables (VlMTaskVertex in
verilated_threads.h) within Verilator, so no need to text bash a lot of
these any more (some text refs still remain but they are all created
next to each other within V3Partition.cpp).
The effect of all this on the emitted code should be nothing but some
identifier/ordering changes. No functional change intended.
This patch introduces the concept of 'loose' methods, which semantically
are methods, but are declared as global functions, and are passed an
explicit 'self' pointer. This enables these methods to be declared
outside the class, only when they are needed, therefore removing the
header dependency. The bulk of the emitted model implementation now uses
loose methods.
astgen now generates ASTGEN_SUPER_* macros, instead of expanding the
ASTGEN_SUPER itself. This means that V3AstNodes.h itself can be included
in V3Ast.h, which helps IDEs (namely CLion) find definitions in
V3AstNodes.h a lot better. Albeit this is a little bit more boilerplate,
writing constructors of Ast nodes should be a lot rarer than trying to
find their definitions, so hopefully this is an improvement overall.
astgen will error if the developer calls the wrong superclass
constructor.
Rework Ast hashing to be stable
Eliminated reliance on pointer values in AstNode hashes in order to make
them stable. This requires moving the sameHash functions into a visitor,
as nodes pointed to via members (and not child nodes) need to be hashed
themselves.
The hashes are now stable (as far as I could test them), and the impact
on verilation time is small enough not to be reliably measurable.
V3Hasher is responsible for computing AstNode hashes, while V3DupFinder
can be used to find duplicate trees based on hashes. Interface of
V3DupFinder simplified somewhat. No functional change intended at this
point, but hash computation might differ in minor details, this however
should have no perceivable effect on output/runtime.
Implements (#2964)
- Remove dead code
- Simplify what is left
- Minor improvements using C++11
- Remove special case AstNode constructors used only in one place in
V3Combine (inlined instead).
No functional changes intended. Boring patch in the hope of being
helpful to new contributors. Although AstNode* base classes needing to
be abstract is described in the internals manual, this might provide a
bit of extra safety.
Geza Lore
Wilson Snyder
Arkadiusz Kozdra
Kevin Kiningham
github action
Krzysztof Bieganski
Julien Margetts