TLM log format - or how to see the transactions ?

[thomas.haber]

Hi everybody,

 

i'm currently developing a free wave viewer for analog/digital and transaction signals for eclipse.

 

I' wondering what data format are typically used here? Or is there any at all?

How  are transactions typically displayed ?

 

 

Thanks for your help.

 

regards,

thomas

[thomas.haber]

So i found these possibilities:

 

* scv has features to record transaction into a text format.

* logic poet made some extension to log transactions into a database.

* UVM Multi Language/ UVM Connect

 

Unfortunately scv is difficult to use on newer linux distributions

(in fact i did not made it so far completely, i just got behind the configuration phase ).

Seems to be difficult to use.

 

UVM i did not understand so far.

[maehne]

Regarding SCV, there are currently efforts in the SystemC Verification Working Group to fix the build system of SCV and make SCV compatible with SystemC 2.3. (There was a public discussion of the future evolution of SCV at DATE 2012 in Dresden, which triggered quite some interest). Though, a public release of the updated SCV hasn't been announced, yet.

[thomas.haber]

Thanks Torsten,

 

Another possibility is the dust framework : http://forge.greensocs.com/ja/Projects/Dust.

 

After discussion with Wolgang Klingauf (who devolped dust), i got the impression that most people brew their own means.

The one given as a kind of standard (SCV) seems to be quite intrusive and difficult (and not continuously supported).

 

I still don't understand why there is not just a standard transaction trace like system-c traces. 

Looking at the code from logpoet , it should not be too difficult.

[maehne]

I agree it's an unsatisfying situation. Unfortunately, good tracing mechanism is low priority for most standardization efforts. It's often considered to be a user-friendliness feature, and thus left to the vendors so that they can diversify their products from others. As you noted, this has led to many homebrewn solutions without any emerging common standards and few really good and versatile waveform viewers. I think it will increasingly become an important issue, as systems tend to get more complex and heterogeneous requiring very different tools during design and sometimes even in co-simulation scenarios, where traces have to be federated into a common analysis tool. Lightweight data formats such as CSV or tabular traces are relatively easy to import into generic tools such as Matlab, R, gnuplot, or Excel. However, their simplicitly then imposes some manual work to adapt the import scripts to new simulation scenarios.

 

Regards, Torsten

[thomas.haber]

I was wondering what is the best way to display a transaction.

I ve seen Logic Poets variant , that displays a series of bubbles representing events plus additional window to display the transactions data.

There are forms where the transaction is displayed as colored lines or in form of a record.

What do you think is best ?

 

regards,

thomas

[thomas.haber]

Finally i finished first version of transaction support.

Unfortunately i don't have many transaction files.

If somebody has problems with the current scv files, please send me a mail.

 

Transaction can have multiple events (not just start and stop).

Parallel transactions are organized in layer (or rows).

For inspection there will be an extended hover support.

 

cheers,thomas