FuseSoC 1.7

Lock up your wifes and daughters! FuseSoC 1.7 has been unleashed on the world. This unstoppable force will organize your HDL dependencies and provide abstractions to your EDA tools without giving you a chance to defend yourself.

Actually, there's not that much new on the surface of this release. Most of the work has been spent on internal refactoring in order to bring in two new major features for the next cycle. The first of these is a separation of the frontend - which handles reading core files, maintains the core database and does dependency resolution - and the backends - which launch the EDA tools. There are several reasons for doing this, but I hope to write more about this specifically in another post. The other major feature is the preparation for a new core description format, called CAPI2. This will be added early in the FuseSoC 1.8 cycle, so expect to read more about this in the future as well. If you are interested in taking an early peek, there's a CAPI2 branch of FuseSoC together with corresponding branch of fusesoc-cores which is used as a playground for now.

So, onto the actual changes.

Test coverage has now reached 72% of the code base. Unit testing is something I should had done from day one, as it has uncovered plenty of bugs and been a huge help when doing refactoring. So kids, get tested you too!

Failure is always an option, and should be handled with the same loving care as success. FuseSoC now exits with an error code when a build or simulation fails, making it easier for external tools to pick up failures. Also, failing scripts now print out the error code on failures to make it easier to analyze what went wrong. Speaking of things going wrong, the parsing of the core files have been made improved to warn for syntax errors instead of leaving the user with a Python stack trace. In general, there has also been many improvements to the logging, so that running with the --verbose option might actually be helpful when debugging strange errors.

There have been a number of improvements in the tool backends, mostly related to parameter passing. The Vivado backend had a bug that prevented passing multiple parameters to the backend. Quartus now supports passing verilog defines on the command-line. Parameters are properly escaped before being passed to the backend, which fixes string parameters for some backends. Other than that, ISIM now supports multiple toplevels, which is required for example when simulating Xilinx primitives that require glbl.v as a parallel toplevel. The Vivado flow now works on Windows after discovering that Vivado prefer forward regardless of what the OS uses as path separator.  The Icarus backend has been rewritten so that it's easier to rebuild the simulation model from an exported build tree.

In addition to fixes and new features, a few features have been removed. Mostly because they made no sense, were broken or turned out to be hard to maintain with little gain. The system-info command is removed, as all details are shown in core-info anyway. The submodule provider was likely broken for a long time without anyone complaining, and was a bad fit for the FuseSoC depedency model, so it has been removed too. There was also a semi-working feature of the verilator backend that aimed to convert files containing verilog `define statements to a correspondent C header file. As there might be users out there actually using this, I added an entry to the FuseSoC migration guide with information on how to replicate this functionality in newer versions of FuseSoC.

Other than that, there are some other bug fixes, like FuseSoC now supports putting IP-XACT files in subdirectories of the core tree. There is also a --version command-line option to show, surprise, the current version of FuseSoC.

That's more or less it. Make sure to upgrade and get prepared for the wild ride that will be FuseSoC 1.8

Peace out!