* Improve tracing performance.
Various tactics used to improve performance of both VCD and FST tracing:
- Both: Change tracing functions to templates to take variable widths as
template parameters. For VCD, subsequently specialize these to the
values used by Verilator. This avoids redundant instructions and hard
to predict branches.
- Both: Check for value changes via direct pointer access into the
previous signal value buffer. This eliminates a lot of simple pointer
arithmetic instructions form the tracing code.
- Both: Verilator provides clean input, no need to mask out used bits.
- VCD: pre-compute identifier codes and use memory copy instead of
re-computing them every time a code is emitted. This saves a lot of
instructions and hard to predict branches. The added D-cache misses
are cheaper than the removed branches/instructions.
- VCD: re-write the routines emitting the changes to be more efficient.
- FST: Use previous signal value buffer the same way as the VCD tracing
code, and only call the FST API when a change is detected.
Performance as measured on SweRV EH1, with the pre-canned CoreMark
benchmark running from DCCM/ICCM, clang 6.0.0, Intel i7-3770 @ 3.40GHz,
and IO to ramdisk:
+--------------+---------------+----------------------+
| VCD | FST | FST separate thread |
| (--trace) | (--trace-fst) | (--trace-fst-thread) |
------------+-----------------------------------------------------+
Before | 30.2 s | 121.1 s | 69.8 s |
============+==============+===============+======================+
After | 24.7 s | 45.7 s | 32.4 s |
------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------+
Speedup | 22 % | 256 % | 215 % |
------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------+
Rel. to VCD | 1 x | 1.85 x | 1.31 x |
------------+--------------+---------------+----------------------+
In addition, FST trace size for the above reduced by 48%.
This looks like a bits/bytes bug. The affected m_codeInc member
determines how many 32-bit words to allocate in a buffer used to store
previous values of the signal, but this was off by a factor of 8, so
we used to use too much memory.
SweRV VCD tracing speed +6.5% (excluding IO, clang 6.0), due mainly to
reduced D cache misses.
When using the __ALL*.cpp based single compile mode (i.e.: without
VM_PARALLEL_BUILDS), the fast path tracing code used to be included in
__Allsup.cpp, which was compiled with OPT_SLOW, severely harming tracing
performance. We now have __ALLfast.cpp and __ALLslow.cpp instead of
__ALLcls.cpp and __ALLsup.cpp, so we can compile the fast support code
with OPT_FAST as well.
This patch eliminates a major piece of inefficiency in FST tracing
support, by using an array to lookup fstHandle values corresponding
to trace codes, instead of a tree based std::map. With this change, FST
tracing is now only about 3x slower than VCD tracing. We do require
more memory to store the symbol lookup table, but the size of that is
still small, for the speed benefit.
* Add +verilator+noassert flag
This allows to disable the assert check per simulation argument.
* Add AssertOn check for assert
Insert the check AssertOn to allow disabling of asserts.
Asserts can be disabled by not using the `--assert` flag or by calling
`AssertOn(false)`, or passing the "+verilator+noassert" runtime flag.
Add tests for this behavior.
Bad tests check that the assert still causes a stop.
Non bad tests check that asserts are properly disabled and cause no stop
of the simulation.
Fixes#2162.
Signed-off-by: Tobias Wölfel <tobias.woelfel@mailbox.org>
* Correct file location
Signed-off-by: Tobias Wölfel <tobias.woelfel@mailbox.org>
* Add description for single test execution
Without this description it is not obvious how to run a single test from
the regression test suite.
Signed-off-by: Tobias Wölfel <tobias.woelfel@mailbox.org>
The build is now by default configured to link performance critical
libraries (libgcc, libstdc++, libtcmalloc) statically. This improves
Verilation speed by between 4.5-7% based on my measurements as it
eliminates approx 20% of the mispredicted branches from the execution.
With partial static linking, the size of the .text section in
verilator_bin is increased by about 14%, and the binary is itself only
about 800KB bigger on disk, so hopefully this is not a big issue in
exchange for the faster compilation speed. A configure option
"--disable-partial-static" is provided to restore the old behaviour of
linking everything dynamically.
Note: This patch also changes to use libtcmalloc_minimal, which is all
we really need and itself has fewer dependencies.
