AutoILA: Simple Integrated Logic Analyzer (ILA) Insertion

Sometimes it takes too long to simulate FireSim on RTL simulators, and in some occasions we would also like to debug the simulation infrastructure itself. For these purposes, we can use the Xilinx Integrated Logic Analyzer resources on the FPGA.

ILAs allows real time sampling of pre-selected signals during FPGA runtime, and provided and interface for setting trigger and viewing samples waveforms from the FPGA. For more information about ILAs, please refer to the Xilinx guide on the topic.

The midas.targetutils package provides annotations for labeling signals directly in the Chisel source. These will be consumed by a downstream FIRRTL pass which wires out the annotated signals, and binds them to an appropriately sized ILA instance.

Enabling AutoILA

To enable AutoILA, mixin WithAutoILA must be prepended to the PLATFORM_CONFIG. Prior to version 1.13, this was done by default.

Annotating Signals

In order to annotate a signal, we must import the midas.targetutils.FpgaDebug annotator. FpgaDebug’s apply method accepts a vararg of chisel3.Data. Invoke it as follows:

import midas.targetutils.FpgaDebug

class SomeModuleIO(implicit p: Parameters) extends SomeIO()(p){
   val out1 = Output(Bool())
   val in1 = Input(Bool())
   FpgaDebug(out1, in1)
}

You can annotate signals throughout FireSim, including in Golden Gate Rocket-Chip Chisel sources, with the only exception being the Chisel3 sources themselves (eg. in Chisel3.util.Queue).

Note: In case the module with the annotated signal is instantiated multiple times, all instatiations of the annotated signal will be wired to the ILA.

Setting a ILA Depth

The ILA depth parameter specifies the duration in cycles to capture annotated signals around a trigger. Increasing this parameter may ease debugging, but will also increase FPGA resource utilization. The default depth is 1024 cycles. The desired depth can be configured much like the desired HostFrequency by appending a mixin to the PLATFORM_CONFIG. See Provided Target Designs for details on PLATFORM_CONFIG.

Below is an example PLATFORM_CONFIG that can be used in the build_recipes config file.

PLATFORM_CONFIG=ILADepth8192_BaseF1Config

Using the ILA at Runtime

Prerequisite: Make sure that ports 8443, 3121 and 10201 are enabled in the “firesim” AWS security group.

In order to use the ILA, we must enable the GUI interface on our manager instance. In the past, AWS had a custom setup_gui.sh script. However, this was recently deprecated due to compatibility issues with various packages. Therefore, AWS currently recommends using NICE DCV as a GUI client. You should download a DCV client, and then run the following commands on your FireSim manager instance:

sudo yum -y groupinstall "GNOME Desktop"
sudo yum -y install glx-utils
sudo rpm --import https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/nice-dcv-publish/NICE-GPG-KEY
wget https://d1uj6qtbmh3dt5.cloudfront.net/2019.0/Servers/nice-dcv-2019.0-7318-el7.tgz
tar xvf nice-dcv-2019.0-7318-el7.tgz
cd nice-dcv-2019.0-7318-el7
sudo yum -y install nice-dcv-server-2019.0.7318-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum -y install nice-xdcv-2019.0.224-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
sudo systemctl enable dcvserver
sudo systemctl start dcvserver
sudo passwd centos
sudo systemctl stop firewalld
dcv create-session --type virtual --user centos centos

These commands will setup Linux desktop pre-requisites, install the NICE DCV server, ask you to setup the password to the centos user, disable firewalld, and finally create a DCV session. You can now connect to this session through the DCV client.

After access the GUI interface, open a terminal, and open vivado. Follow the instructions in the AWS-FPGA guide for connecting xilinx hardware manager on vivado (running on a remote machine) to the debug target .

where <hostname or IP address> is the internal IP of the simulation instance (not the manager instance. i.e. The IP starting with 192.168.X.X). The probes file can be found in the manager instance under the path firesim/deploy/results-build/<build_identifier>/cl_firesim/build/checkpoints/<probes_file.ltx>

Select the ILA with the description of WRAPPER_INST/CL/CL_FIRESIM_DEBUG_WIRING_TRANSFORM, and you may now use the ILA just as if it was on a local FPGA.