FuseSoC 1.8.2

FuseSoC 1.9 will have an impact so great that people will divide history into the eras before and after it's release. But before that happens, it's time for a less earth-shattering minor release. Allow me to introduce FuseSoC 1.8.2

Backend separation

The biggest feature is also the least visible for most users. A lot of time since the last release was spent on moving stuff around with the ultimate goal of splitting out the backends (the part that create project files and launches EDA tools) to a separate library. This is now complete and the former backend code now lives in a separate library called edalize, which remains part of FuseSoC for now, but will be moved out at some point. The ideas behind this will be a topic for a separate article at some point, but if you're building some Python tool that wants to use the EDA tool wrappers, look for edalize now.

Linter backends

FuseSoC.. sorry, Edalize has gained a new backend for Synopsys SpyGlass which is a powerful linter tool. For a less costly linter, it is now possible also to use the linter mode of Verilator by setting mode to lint-only in the verilator section of the tool options in a target like this

targets:
  lint:
    tools:
      verilator:
        mode: lint-only

CAPI2 changes

The latest core description format has had some minor improvements. The top-level option was originally specified as a list of modules. since there are cases when several top-modules are needed. This however is quite rare, which makes it confusing that it's just a list of one item in most cases. Therefore it can now also be specified as a string. Small improvement, but makes things less annoying. Environment variables are also expanded in file names.

Other changes

Sometimes you really want to ignore a core that's part of a library. By adding a file called FUSESOC_IGNORE to a directory, FuseSoC will ignore that directory and everything below it. There is also a series of tutorials in the works. These are very rough drafts at this point, but I encourage everyone who wants to get started with FuseSoC to take a look through them anyway. They are located here

That's pretty much it. As usual, a number of bugs were fixed but nothing worth taking up more of your precious time. Thank you for reading. See you again in the post FuseSoC 1.9 era