Aggressive wire localization and inlining is necessary for CXXRTL to
achieve high performance. However, that comes with a cost: reduced
debug information coverage. Previously, as a workaround, the `-Og`
option could have been used to guarantee complete coverage, at a cost
of a significant performance penalty.
This commit introduces debug information outlining. The main eval()
function is compiled with the user-specified optimization settings.
In tandem, an auxiliary debug_eval() function, compiled from the same
netlist, can be used to reconstruct the values of localized/inlined
signals on demand. To the extent that it is possible, debug_eval()
reuses the results of computations performed by eval(), only filling
in the missing values.
Benchmarking a representative design (Minerva SoC SRAM) shows that:
* Switching from `-O4`/`-Og` to `-O6` reduces runtime by ~40%.
* Switching from `-g1` to `-g2`, both used with `-O6`, increases
compile time by ~25%.
* Although `-g2` increases the resident size of generated modules,
this has no effect on runtime.
Because the impact of `-g2` is minimal and the benefits of having
unconditional 100% debug information coverage (and the performance
improvement as well) are major, this commit removes `-Og` and changes
the defaults to `-O6 -g2`.
We'll have our cake and eat it too!
"Elision" in this context is an unusual and not very descriptive term
whereas "inlining" is common and straightforward. Also, introducing
"inlining" makes it easier to introduce its dual under the obvious
name "outlining".
Before this commit, a cell's input was always assigned like:
p_cell.p_input = (value...);
If `p_input` is buffered (e.g. if the design is built at -O0), this
is not correct. (In practice, this breaks clocking.) Unfortunately,
the incorrect design was compiled without diagnostics because wire<>
was move-assignable and also implicitly constructible from value<>.
After this commit, cell inputs are no longer incorrectly assumed to
always be unbuffered, and wires are not assignable from values.
RTL contract violations and C++ contract violations are different:
the former depend on the netlist and will never violate memory safety
whereas the latter may. When loading a CXXRTL simulation into another
process, RTL contract violations should generally not crash it, while
C++ contract violations should.
Although it is always possible to destroy and recreate the design to
simulate a power-on reset, this has two drawbacks:
* Black boxes are also destroyed and recreated, which causes them
to reacquire their resources, which might be costly and/or erase
important state.
* Pointers into the design are invalidated and have to be acquired
again, which is costly and might be very inconvenient if they are
captured elsewhere (especially through the C API).
In most cases, a CXXRTL simulation would use a top module, either
because this module serves as an entry point to the CXXRTL C API,
or because the outputs of a top module are unbuffered, improving
performance. Taking this into account, the CXXRTL backend now runs
`hierarchy -auto-top` if there is no top module. For the few cases
where this behavior is unwanted, it now accepts a `-nohierarchy`
option.
Fixes#2373.
This can be useful to determine whether the wire should be a part of
a design checkpoint, whether it can be used to override design state,
and whether driving it may cause a conflict.
Before this commit, the meaning of "sync def" included some flip-flop
cells but not others. There was no actual reason for this; it was
just poorly defined.
After this commit, a "sync def" means that a wire holds design state
because it is connected directly to a flip-flop output, and may never
be unbuffered. This is not affected by presence of async inputs.
This can be useful to distinguish e.g. a combinatorially driven wire
with type `CXXRTL_VALUE` from a module input with the same type, as
well as general introspection.
For several reasons:
* They're more convenient than accessing .data.
* They accommodate variably-sized types like size_t transparently.
* They statically ensure that no out of range conversions happen.
For now these are only provided for unsigned integers, but eventually
they should be provided for signed integers too. (Annoyingly this
affects conversions to/from `char` at the moment.)
Fixes#2127.
This can result in massive reduction in runtime, up to 50% depending
on workload. Currently people are using `-mllvm -inline-threshold=`
as a workaround (with clang++), but this solution is more portable.
This was a correctness issue, but one of the consequences is that it
resulted in jumps in generated machine code where there should have
been none. As a side effect of fixing the bug, Minerva SoC became 10%
faster.
Without unbuffering output wires of, at least, toplevel modules, it
is not possible to have most designs that rely on IO via toplevel
ports (as opposed to using exclusively blackboxes) converge within
one delta cycle. That seriously impairs the performance of CXXRTL.
This commit avoids unbuffering outputs of all modules solely so that
in future, CXXRTL could gain fully separate compilation, and not for
any present technical reason.
With this change, it is easier to see which signals carry state (only
wire<>s appear as `reg` in VCD files) and to construct a minimal
checkpoint (CXXRTL_WIRE debug items represent the canonical smallest
set of state required to fully reconstruct the simulation).
Although logically two separate steps, these were treated as one for
historic reasons. Splitting the two makes it possible to have designs
that are only 2× slower than fastest possible (and are without extra
delta cycles) that allow probing all public wires.
Historically, elision was implemented before localization, so levels
with elision are lower than corresponding levels with localization.
This is unfortunate for two reasons:
1. Elision is a logical subset of localization, since it equals to
not giving a name to a temporary.
2. "Localize" currently actually means "unbuffer and localize",
and it would be useful to split those steps (at least for
public wires) for improved design visibility.
Although these options can be thought of as optimizations, they are
essentially orthogonal to the core of -O, which is managing signal
buffering and scope. Going from -O4 to -O2 means going from limited
to complete design visibility, yet in both cases proc and flatten
are desirable.
Before this commit, Verilog expressions like `x && 1` would result in
references to `logic_and_us` in generated CXXRTL code, which would
not compile. After this commit, since cells like that actually behave
the same regardless of signedness attributes, the signedness is
ignored, which also reduces the template instantiation pressure.
This commit changes the VCD writer such that for all signals that
have `debug_item.type == VALUE && debug_item.next == nullptr`, it
would only sample the value once.
Commit f2d7a187 added more debug information by including constant
wires, and decreased the performance of VCD writer proportionally
because the constant wires were still repeatedly sampled; this commit
eliminates the performance hit.
Constant wires can represent a significant chunk of the design in
generic designs or after optimization. Emitting them in VCD files
significantly improves usability because gtkwave removes all traces
that are not present in the VCD file after reload, and iterative
development suffers if switching a varying signal to a constant
disrupts the workflow.
This commit changes the VCD writer such that for all signals that
share `debug_item.curr`, it would only emit a single VCD identifier,
and sample the value once.
Commit 9b39c6f7 added redundancy to debug information by including
alias wires, and increased the size of VCD files proportionally; this
commit eliminates the redundancy from VCD files so that their size
is the same as before.
Alias wires can represent a significant chunk of the design in highly
hierarchical designs; in Minerva SRAM, there are 273 member wires and
527 alias wires. Showing them in every hierarchy level significantly
improves usability.
Compared to the C++ API, the C API currently has two limitations:
1. Memories cannot be updated in a race-free way.
2. Black boxes cannot be implemented in C.
Debug information describes values, wires, and memories with a simple
C-compatible layout. It can be emitted on demand into a map, which
has no runtime cost when it is unused, and allows late bound designs.
The `hdlname` attribute is used as the lookup key such that original
names, as emitted by the frontend, can be used for debugging and
introspection.
This isn't actually necessary anymore after scheduling was improved,
and `clean -purge` disrupts the mapping between wires in the input
RTLIL netlist and the output CXXRTL code.
log_assert(false) never returns and thus can't fall through, but gcc
doesn't seem to think that far. Making it the last case avoids the
problem entirely.
Strategically inserting the pending memory write in memory::update to keep the
queue sorted allows us to skip the queue sort in memory::commit.
The Minerva SRAM SoC runs ~7% faster as a result.
This is quite possibly the worst way to implement this, but it does
work for a subset of well-behaved designs, and can be used to measure
how much performance is lost simulating the inactive edge of a clock.
It should be replaced with a clock tree analyzer generating safe
code once it is clear how should such a thing look like.
If the annotations are not used, this commit does not alter semantics
at all, other than removing elision of outputs of black box cells.
(Elision of such outputs is expected to be too rare to have any
noticeable benefit, and the implementation was somewhat of a hack.)
The (* cxxrtl.comb *) annotation alters the semantics of the output
of the black box it is applied to such that, if the black box
converges immediately, no additional delta cycle is necessary to
propagate the computed combinatorial value upwards in hierarchy.
The (* cxxrtl.sync *) annotation alters the semantics of the output
of the black box it is applied to such as to remove any uses of
the black box by the wires connected to this output, and break false
feedback arcs arising from conservative modeling of dependencies of
the black box.
Although currently these attributes are only recognized on black
boxes, if separate compilation is added in the future, it could also
emit and consume them.
The attribute for this is called (* cxxrtl.edge *), and there is
a planned attribute (* cxxrtl.sync *) that would cause blackbox
cell outputs to be added to sync defs rather than comb defs.
Rename the edge detector related stuff to avoid confusion.
If it is statically known that eval() will converge in one delta
cycle (that is, the second commit() will always return `false`)
because the design contains no feedback or buffered wires, then
there is no need to run the second delta cycle at all.
After this commit, the case where eval() always converges immediately
is detected and the second delta cycle is omitted. As a result,
Minerva SRAM SoC runs ~25% faster.
People judge a compiler backend by the first impression, and
the metric they judge it for is speed. -O6 does severely impact
debuggability, but it provides equally massive gains in performance,
so use it by default.
Module input wires are never set by the module, so it is unnecessary
to buffer them. Although important for all inputs, this is especially
critical for clocks, since after this commit, hierarchy levels no
longer add delta cycles. As a result, Minerva SRAM SoC runs ~73%
faster when flattened, and ~264% (!!) faster when hierarchical.
This commit changes the way edge detectors are represented in
generated code from a variable that is set in commit() and reset in
eval() to a function that considers .curr and .next of the clock
wire. Behavior remains the same. Besides being simpler to generate
and providing more opportunities for optimization, this commit paves
way for unbuffering module inputs.
Before this commit, any wire that was not driven by an output port of
exactly one comb cell would not be localized, even if there were no
feedback arcs through that wire. This would cause the wire to become
buffered and require (often quite a few) extraneous delta cycles
during evaluation. To alleviate this problem, -O5 was running
`splitnets -driver`.
However, this solution was mistaken. Because `splitnets -driver`
followed by `opt_clean -purge` would produce more nets with multiple
drivers, it would have to be iterated to fixpoint. Moreover, even if
this was done, it would not be sufficient because `opt_clean -purge`
does not currently remove wires with the `\init` attribute (and it
is not desirable to remove such wires, since they correspond to
registers and may be useful for debugging).
The proper solution is to consider the condition in which a wire
may be localized. Specifically, if there are no feedback arcs through
this wire, and no part of the wire is driven by an output of a sync
cell, then the wire holds no state and is localizable.
After this commit, the original condition for not localizing a wire
is replaced by a check for any sync cell driving it. This makes it
unnecessary to run `splitnets -driver` in the majority of cases
to get a design with no buffered wires, and -O5 no longer includes
that pass. As a result, Minerva SRAM SoC no longer has any buffered
wires, and runs ~27% faster.
In addition, this commit prepares the flow graph for introduction
of sync outputs of black boxes.
Co-authored-by: Jean-François Nguyen <jf@lambdaconcept.com>
Any buffered combinatorial wires (including, as a subset, feedback
wires) will prevent the design from always converging in one delta
cycle. Before this commit, only feedback wires were detected. After
this commit, any buffered combinatorial wires, including feedback
wires, are detected.
Co-authored-by: Jean-François Nguyen <jf@lambdaconcept.com>
Both parameters and attributes are necessary because the parameters
have to be the same between every instantiation of the cell, but
attributes may well vary. For example, for an UART PHY, the type
of the PHY (tty, pty, socket) would be a parameter, but configuration
of the implementation specified by the type (socket address) would
be an attribute.
This commit adds support for replacing RTLIL modules with CXXRTL
black boxes. Black box port widths may not depend on the parameters
with which it is instantiated (yet); the parameters may only be used
to change the behavior of the black box.
whitequark
Andy Knowles
Marcelina Kościelnicka
Jean-François Nguyen
MerryMage
Mike Walters
Xiretza
David Shah
Asu