Hardware Logging

[xThaid]

Inspired by recent PR with assertions, I made a draft of a small utility for logging various events. The usage would be simple - call
log.debug(m, trigger, "message with formats, e.g. {:08x}", pc) somewhere in the circuit and then during the simulation, a log message would be printed whenever trigger is high with the signals provided.

I think this could also supersede assertions - a specific level of logging (could be error) could basically raise an assertion whenever a trigger is high.

As an example, I added one log to the jumpbranch unit and this is an excerpt from the output of the test:

DEBUG 477 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x00002150 to 0x00002154; misprediction: 1
DEBUG 478 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x0000215c to 0x00002160; misprediction: 0
DEBUG 494 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x00002152 to 0x00002156; misprediction: 1
DEBUG 495 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x00002154 to 0x00002240; misprediction: 1
DEBUG 498 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x0000215c to 0x00002160; misprediction: 0
DEBUG 501 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x00002166 to 0x00002168; misprediction: 0
DEBUG 502 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x00002168 to 0x0000216c; misprediction: 1
DEBUG 521 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x0000215c to 0x00002160; misprediction: 0
DEBUG 522 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x00002166 to 0x0000216a; misprediction: 1
DEBUG 523 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x0000216a to 0x0000216e; misprediction: 1
DEBUG 524 coreblocks/fu/jumpbranch.py:212] jumping from 0x0000216c to 0x00002240; misprediction: 1

It integrates with cocotb nicely:

TODO:

• support for cocotb
• CLI flags for setting the level
• unify with assertions?
• doc strings

To test it you can run either:

$ pytest --log-level=debug -vs -k test_jb_unit.py
$ pytest --coreblocks-regression --log-level DEBUG --coreblocks-log-filter "wishbone" -vs -k "rv32uc-rvc"
$ pytest --coreblocks-regression --log-level DEBUG --coreblocks-log-filter "backend" --coreblocks-backend pysim -vs -k "rv32uc-rvc"

[tilk]

Looks pretty cool - this makes another software development comfort available in hardware..

[tilk]

An idea - maybe the log entries should also contain some sort of subsystem identifiers? This way, a given subsystem might make log entries at different log levels, and it would be possible to filter both on log levels and subsystems.

[lekcyjna123]

Aren't there any python library to print text in color?

[xThaid]

I don't want to add another dependency for such a simple functionality.

[lekcyjna123]

Why this is multiline now, when there is less arguments?

[xThaid]

Fixed.

[tilk]

Waiting on branch conflicts.