This patch de-duplicates common functionality between the VCD and FST
trace implementation. It also enables adding new trace formats more
easily and consistently.
No functional nor performance change intended.
The FST trace timescale used to be set in the constructor via
set_time_unit, but at that point we haven't normally opened the
file yet so it was just dropped. On top of that, we actually want
to use set_time_resolution... FST trace timescales now match the VCD.
If the first dump was not at time zero, then the FST trace used
to contain the initial values as if they were set at time zero. Now
they only appear at the time the first dump call is actually made,
and hence match the VCD trace exactly.
Includes `timescale, $printtimescale, $timeformat.
VL_TIME_MULTIPLIER, VL_TIME_PRECISION, VL_TIME_UNIT have been removed
and the time precision must now match the SystemC time precision.
To get closer behavior to older versions, use e.g. --timescale-override
"1ps/1ps".
* 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.
