Pause and resume functionality in GTKWave Viewer.

Hi All,
I am using Icarus Verilog compiler and GTKWave as a viewer.
My question is, can I pause a simulation in Icarus, take a .vcd dump
(till the paused point), view it in GTKWave and then continue the
simulation till another point, again pause it there and view the
results of the second part without loading a new dump altogether ?

I have tried to find out whether this is possible in GTKWave (using
whatever online help that's available), but couldn't get anywhere.

Any help on this would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Amit.

 

For the 1.3 series, no, it's not currently possible.

It supposedly is available with Manchester's code fork (the 2.0pre
series) but I have not verified that feature or its stability. I plan
on promoting 1.3 to 3.0 in the near future so pause/restart is
"potentially" on my to-do list but it is not a priority as there are
more pressing feature adds in development.

http://ivi.sourceforge.net/ might be more along the lines of what you
need. gtkwave was intended to be a post-mortem simulation analysis
tool, not one that can run in lockstep with a simulator.

-Tony

 

[Stephen Williams]

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bybell@rocketmail.com wrote:

For the 1.3 series, no, it's not currently possible.

It supposedly is available with Manchester's code fork (the 2.0pre
series) but I have not verified that feature or its stability. I plan
on promoting 1.3 to 3.0 in the near future so pause/restart is
"potentially" on my to-do list but it is not a priority as there are
more pressing feature adds in development.

Actually, there is some minimal support. First, the LXT2 format
that Icarus Verilog can dump can be read incrementally. It writes
out in blocks, and you can start gtkwave on the dumpfile while
Icarus Verilog is still simulating. "man vvp" to learn how to
activate different dumpers.

Second, the run time engine can be paused with a Ctrl-C. This gets
you a prompt. Then at the prompt, type $dumpflush to flush the
current dumper state. You can resume with the continue command.
But again, gtkwave doesn't automatically load additional data if
the dump file grows, you need to restart it.

- --
Steve Williams "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve at icarus.com But I have promises to keep,
http://www.icarus.com and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com And lines to code before I sleep."
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[mk]

On 5 Apr 2006 08:30:06 -0700, bybell@rocketmail.com wrote:

For the 1.3 series, no, it's not currently possible.

It supposedly is available with Manchester's code fork (the 2.0pre
series) but I have not verified that feature or its stability. I plan
on promoting 1.3 to 3.0 in the near future so pause/restart is
"potentially" on my to-do list but it is not a priority as there are
more pressing feature adds in development.

Is there a list of features you're considering for 3.0 ? Are you
taking requests? Supporting re-reading of growing lxt2 files would be
nice. Especially given that more simulators will support generating
lxt2 files pretty soon ;-)

 

Kal,

Glad to see you're working on getting the LXT2 API to do what you want.
=)

Stuff on the list of features are things like source code annotation,
model traversals, a real instruction manual, more SMP capabilities in
the file readers, etc. Right now there's already a bunch of stuff
people generally don't know about such as being able to attach
disassemblers to the viewer so they can work in realtime with each
other. (Read ALIAS_README.TXT in the root directory.) Then there's
correlating sim logfiles with the waveform display, etc. Basically,
it's stuff I've recently needed in order to do my day job...

Dumpfile re-reading is certainly doable given enough brain surgery in
the viewer, but given the existance of savefiles, enough of the viewer
state is present so it's not a strict necessity. The main reason it's
not there is that sim jobs I run can take a half an hour or an hour so
it's not like I need to reload a dumpfile as I don't generate dumpfiles
in place as they're created by a sim pool.

-Tony