Similar to the treatment of black boxes, splitting processes into two
scheduling nodes adds sufficient freedom so that netlists with
well-behaved processes (e.g. those emitted by nMigen) can immediately
converge.
Because processes are not emitted into edge-triggered regions, this
approach has comparable performance to -O5 (without -noproc), which
is substantially slower than -O6.
The exact shape of C++ code emitted by CXXRTL has a critical effect
on performance, both compile-time and runtime. CXXRTL's performance
greatly improved when it started localizing and inlining wires, not
only because this assists the optimizer and register allocator, but
also because inlining code into edge-triggered regions cuts the time
spent in eval() by at least a factor of two.
However, the logic of netlist layout has always been ad-hoc, fragile,
and very hard to understand and modify. After commit ece25a45, which
introduced outlining, the same logic started being applied to two
distinct netlists at once instead of one, which barely worked.
This commit does four major changes:
* There is now a single unambiguous source of truth (per subgraph)
for the layout of any emitted wire.
* Netlist layout is now done entirely during analysis using well
known graph algorithms; no graph operations happen when emitting.
* Netlist layout now happens completely separately for eval() and
debug_eval() subgraphs.
* Unreachable (within subgraph scope) netlist nodes are now neither
emitted nor considered for wire inlining decisions.
The netlist layout code should also now closely match the described
semantics.
As a part of this large cleanup, it includes many miscellaneous
improvements:
* The "bare minimum" debug level introduced in commit dd6a761d was
split into two levels; -g1 now emits debug information *only* for
inputs and state wires, and -g2 now emits debug information for
all public members. The old behavior matches -g2. This is done
to avoid bloat on low optimization levels.
* Debug aliases and inlined connections are now handled separately,
and complex RHS never interferes with inlined connections.
* Aliases to outlined wires now carry a pointer to the outline.
* Cell sync outputs can now be emitted in debug_eval().
* Black box debug information now includes comb/sync driver flags.
* The comment emitted for inlined cells is now accurate.
* Debug information statistics now has less noise.
* Netlist layout code is now much better documented.
Due to more precise inlining decisions, unmodified (i.e. with no
Yosys script being used) netlists now have much more logic inlined
into edge-triggered regions. On Minerva SoC SRAM, this improves
runtime by 20-25% across compilers and optimization levels.
Due to more precise reachability analysis, much less C++ code is now
emitted, especially at the maximum debug level. On Minerva SoC SRAM,
this improves clang compile time by 30-50% depending on options.
gcc is not affected.
On Minerva SoC SRAM compiled with clang-11, this change cuts commit
time in half (!) and overall time by 20%. When compiled with gcc-10,
there is no difference.
In C, non-static inline functions require an implementation elsewhere
(even though the body is right there in the header). It is basically
never desirable to use those as opposed to static inline ones.
Implementing outlining has greatly increased the amount of debug
information in a typical build, and consequently exposed performance
issues in C++ compilers, which are similar for both GCC and Clang;
the compile time of Minerva SoC SRAM increased almost twofold.
Although one would expect the slowdown to be caused by the increased
use of templates in `debug_eval()`, it is actually almost entirely
attributable to optimizations and codegen for `debug_items()`.
Fortunately, it is neither possible nor desirable to optimize
`debug_items()`: in most cases it is called exactly once, and its
body is a linear sequence of calls with unique arguments.
This commit turns off optimizations for `debug_items()` on GCC and
Clang, improving -Os compile time of Minerva SoC SRAM by ~40% (!)
Before this commit, if a sequence of wires assigned in a chain would
terminate on a cell, none of the wires would get marked as aliases,
and typically all of the public wires would get outlined. The reason
for this behavior is that alias analysis predates outlining and in
fact runs before it.
After this commit, alias analysis runs after outlining and considers
outlined wires valid aliasees. More importantly, if the chained wires
contain any valid aliasees, then all of the wires are aliased to
the one that is topologically deepest.
Aliased wires incur virtually no overhead for the VCD writer, unlike
outlined wires that would otherwise take their place. On Minerva SoC
SRAM, size of the full VCD dump is reduced by ~65%, and throughput
is increased by ~55%.
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).
* backends/blif: Remove unused vector of strings
For reasons that are unclear to me, this was being used to store every
result of `cstr` before returning them. The vector was never accessed otherwise,
resulting in a huge unnecessary memory sink when emitting to BLIF.
* backends/blif: Remove CSTR macro
* backends/blif: Actually call str()
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.
The only difference between "RTLIL" and "ILANG" is that the latter is
the text representation of the former, as opposed to the in-memory
graph representation. This distinction serves no purpose but confuses
people: it is not obvious that the ILANG backend writes RTLIL graphs.
Passes `write_ilang` and `read_ilang` are provided as aliases to
`write_rtlil` and `read_rtlil` for compatibility.
This commit adds support for real-valued parameters in blackboxes. Additionally,
parameters now retain their types are no longer all encoded as strings.
There is a caveat with this implementation due to my limited knowledge of yosys,
more specifically to how yosys encodes bitwidths of parameter values. The example
below can motivate the implementation choice I took. Suppose a verilog component
is declared with the following parameters:
parameter signed [26:0] test_signed;
parameter [26:0] test_unsigned;
parameter signed [40:0] test_signed_large;
If you instantiate it as follows:
defparam <inst_name> .test_signed = 49;
defparam <inst_name> .test_unsigned = 40'd35;
defparam <inst_name> .test_signed_large = 40'd12;
If you peek in the RTLIL::Const structure corresponding to these params, you
realize that parameter "test_signed" is being considered as a 32-bit value
since it's declared as "49" without a width specifier, even though the parameter
is defined to have a maximum width of 27 bits.
A similar issue occurs for parameter "test_unsigned" where it is supposed to take
a maximum bit width of 27 bits, but if the user supplies a 40-bit value as above,
then yosys considers the value to be 40 bits.
I suppose this is due to the type being defined by the RHS rather than the definition.
Regardless of this, I emit the same widths as what the user specifies on the RHS when
generating firrtl IR.
Previous blackbox components were just emitted with their interface ports,
but their generic parameters were never emitted and it was therefore
impossible to customize them.
This commit adds support for blackbox generic parameters, though support
is only provided for INTEGER and STRING parameters. Other types of
parameters such as DOUBLEs, ..., would result in undefined behavior here.
This allows the emission of custom extmodule instances such as the following:
extmodule fourteennm_lcell_comb_<instName>:
input cin: UInt<1>
output combout: UInt<1>
output cout: UInt<1>
input dataa: UInt<1>
input datab: UInt<1>
input datac: UInt<1>
input datad: UInt<1>
input datae: UInt<1>
input dataf: UInt<1>
input datag: UInt<1>
input datah: UInt<1>
input sharein: UInt<1>
output shareout: UInt<1>
output sumout: UInt<1>
defname = fourteennm_lcell_comb
parameter extended_lut = "off"
parameter lut_mask = "b0001001000010010000100100001001000010010000100100001001000010010"
parameter shared_arith = "off"
Refer to the SMT-LIB specification, section 4.1.7. According to the spec, some options can only be specified in `start` mode. Once the solver sees `set-logic`, it moves to `assert` mode.
This commit only affects translation of RTLIL processes (for which
there is limited support).
Due to the event-driven nature of Verilog, processes like
reg x;
always @*
x <= 1;
may never execute. This can be fixed in SystemVerilog code by using
`always_comb` instead of `always @*`, but in Verilog-2001 the options
are limited. This commit implements the following workaround:
reg init = 0;
reg x;
always @* begin
if (init) begin end
x <= 1;
end
Fixes#2271.
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.
whitequark
Marcelina Kościelnicka
Iris Johnson
Pepijn de Vos
Miodrag Milanovic
Sahand Kashani
William Woodruff
Jakob Wenzel
N. Engelhardt
Xiretza
Noah Moroze
Andy Knowles
Alberto Gonzalez
Claire Wolf
Jean-François Nguyen
MerryMage
Mike Walters