Change the Travis builds to use workspaces and persistent ccache
We proceed in 2 stages (as before, but using workspaces for
persistence):
1. In the 'build' stage, we clone the repo, build it and
save the whole checkout ($TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR) as a workspace
2. In the 'test' stage, rather than cloning the repo, multiple jobs
pull down the same workspace we built to run the tests from
This enables:
- Reuse of the build in multiple test jobs (this is what we used the Travis
cache for before)
- Each job having a separate persistent Travis cache, which now only
contains the ccache. This means all jobs, including 'build' and 'test'
jobs can make maximum use of ccache across runs. This drastically cuts
down build times when the ccache hits, which is very often the case for
'test' jobs. Also, the separate caches only store the objects build by
the particular job that owns the cache, so we can keep the per job
ccache small.
If the commit message contains '[travis ccache clear]', the ccache will
be cleared at the beginning of the build. This can be used to test build
complete within the 50 minute timeout imposed by Travis, even without a
persistent ccache.
As Verilator continuously allocates and releases small objects (e.g.:
AstNode, V3GraphVertex, V3GraphEdge), it spends a significant amount of
time in malloc/free and friends. This patch adds the --enable-tcmalloc
configure option to link Verilator against the high performance malloc
implementation library libtcmalloc. The default is to use libtcmalloc if
available on the system. Note that there are no source code change, we
are simply replacing the standard library memory allocation functions.
Measured major compilation speed improvement of 27% when running
Verilator with -O3 on a large design.
