This patch adds some abstract enums to pass to the trace decl* APIs, so
the VCD/FST specific code can be kept in verilated_{vcd,fst}_*.cc, and
removed from V3Emit*. It also reworks the generation of the trace init
functions (those that call 'decl*' for the signals) such that the scope
hierarchy is traversed precisely once during initialization, which
simplifies the FST writer. This later change also has the side effect of
fixing tracing of nested interfaces when traced via an interface
reference - see the change in the expected t_interface_ref_trace - which
previously were missed.
Some values emitted to the trace files are constant (e.g.: actual
parameter values), and never change. Previously we used to trace these
in the 'full' dumps, which also included all other truly variable
signals. This patch introduces a new generated trace function 'const',
to complement the 'full' and 'chg' flavour, and 'const' now only
contains the constant signals, while 'full' and 'chg' contain only the
truly variable signals. The generate 'full' and 'chg' trace functions
now have exactly the same shape. Note that 'const' signals are still
traced using the 'full*' dump methods of the trace buffers, so there is
no need for a third flavour of those.
All remaining use of conditional compilation in the tracing
implementation of the run-time library are replaced with the use of
VerilatedModel::traceConfig, and is now done at run-time.
Always build the FST libray with -DFST_WRITER_PARALLEL, iff VL_THREADED.
This supports run-time enablement of the FST writer thread, and has no
measurable performance impact on single threaded tracing but simplifies
the library build.
Note: the actual choice of using the fst writer thread is still compile
time, but can now be made run-time easily.
Step towards a proper run-time library. Reduce the amount of ifdefs in
the implementation of offloaded tracing. There are still a very small
number of ifdefs left, which will need more careful changes in order to
keep user API compatibility.
VCD tracing is now parallelized using the same thread pool as the model.
We achieve this by breaking the top level trace functions into multiple
top level functions (as many as --threads), and after emitting the time
stamp to the VCD file on the main thread, we execute the tracing
functions in parallel on the same thread pool as the model (which we
pass to the trace file during registration), tracing into a secondary
per thread buffer. The main thread will then stitch (memcpy) the buffers
together into the output file.
This makes the `--trace-threads` option redundant with `--trace`, which
now only affects `--trace-fst`. FST tracing uses the previous offloading
scheme.
This obviously helps a lot in VCD tracing performance, and I have seen
better than Amdahl speedup, namely I get 3.9x on XiangShan 4T (2.7x on
OpenTitan 4T).
Trace initialization (tracep->decl* functions) used to explicitly pass
the complete hierarchical names of signals as string constants. This
contains a lot of redundancy (path prefixes), does not scale well with
large designs and resulted in .rodata sections (the string constants) in
ELF executables being extremely large.
This patch changes the API of trace initialization that allows pushing
and popping name prefixes as we walk the hierarchy tree, which are
prepended to declared signal names at run-time during trace
initialization. This in turn allows us to emit repeat path/name
components only once, effectively removing all duplicate path prefixes.
On SweRV EH1 this reduces the .rodata section in a --trace build by 94%.
Additionally, trace declarations are now emitted in lexical order by
hierarchical signal names, and the top level trace initialization
function respects --output-split-ctrace.
** Add simulation context (VerilatedContext) to allow multiple fully independent
models to be in the same process. Please see the updated examples.
** Add context->time() and context->timeInc() API calls, to set simulation time.
These now are recommended in place of the legacy sc_time_stamp().
Use SIMD intrinsics to render VCD traces.
I have measured 10-40% single threaded performance increase with VCD
tracing on SweRV EH1 and lowRISC Ibex using SSE2 intrinsics to render
the trace. Also helps a tiny bit with FST, but now almost all of the FST
overhead is in the FST library.
I have reworked the tracing routines to use more precisely sized
arguments. The nice thing about this is that the performance without the
intrinsics is pretty much the same as it was before, as we do at most 2x
as much work as necessary, but in exchange there are no data dependent
branches at all.
