November 30th, 2013
I Went exploring in Wantage, Oxfordshire today. It’s a nice little market town that’s apparently the birth place of Alfred the Great.
The local museum was unexpectedly brilliant. My favourite bit was this replica of a Wantage tram carriage complete with dead mice:
Predictably everything hereabouts is named after Alfred. Here’s King Alfred’s school which is a rather attractive building:
Afterwards I went for a semi-circular walk back to Didcot through the Lambourn Downs and Ridgeway that I’ve visited before. I stopped for lunch here by this huge hill.
November 24th, 2013
I recently added a code coverage option to the VHDL compiler, nvc, I’m working on. I tend to find code coverage a really useful tool when I’m writing RTL, especially the sort of control-dominated designs I do in my day job. I find Modelsim’s HTML coverage reports a bit frustrating so I’m trying to do something more user-friendly in my simulator.
If you elaborate your design with the --cover option the generated code will be annotated to gather the following kinds of coverage:
- Statement – A counter is added for each executable statement in the design. A statement must be executed at least once to be “covered”.
- Branch – A branch is covered if it is both taken and not-taken at least once during execution
- Condition – A condition here is a Boolean sub-expression of branch test and it is covered by evaluating to both TRUE and FALSE at least once. For example
if A and B then contains one branch but two sub-conditions.
After a run with coverage enabled the statistics are automatically reported:
** Note: coverage report generated in /tmp/work/WORK.TEST.cover/
282/289 statements covered
71/94 branches covered
85/108 conditions coveredA HTML report is then generated which contains a top-level summary and a detailed report for each source file:
You can mouse over a non-covered branch or condition to get a hint as to why it was not covered.
The implementation is currently a work-in-progress but functions well enough for light usage. The biggest limitation at the moment is that the report only contains aggregated statistics per-file rather than per-instance statistics.
Posts