This is a major re-design of the way code is scheduled in Verilator,
with the goal of properly supporting the Active and NBA regions of the
SystemVerilog scheduling model, as defined in IEEE 1800-2017 chapter 4.
With this change, all internally generated clocks should simulate
correctly, and there should be no more need for the `clock_enable` and
`clocker` attributes for correctness in the absence of Verilator
generated library models (`--lib-create`).
Details of the new scheduling model and algorithm are provided in
docs/internals.rst.
Implements #3278
This patch implements #3032. Verilator creates a module representing the
SystemVerilog $root scope (V3LinkLevel::wrapTop). Until now, this was
called the "TOP" module, which also acted as the user instantiated model
class. Syms used to hold a pointer to this root module, but hold
instances of any submodule. This patch renames this root scope module
from "TOP" to "$root", and introduces a separate model class which is
now an interface class. As the root module is no longer the user
interface class, it can now be made an instance of Syms, just like any
other submodule. This allows absolute references into the root module to
avoid an additional pointer indirection resulting in a potential speedup
(about 1.5% on OpenTitan). The model class now also contains all non
design specific generated code (e.g.: eval loops, trace config, etc),
which additionally simplifies Verilator internals.
Please see the updated documentation for the model interface changes.
This patch introduces the concept of 'loose' methods, which semantically
are methods, but are declared as global functions, and are passed an
explicit 'self' pointer. This enables these methods to be declared
outside the class, only when they are needed, therefore removing the
header dependency. The bulk of the emitted model implementation now uses
loose methods.
