Timed-Value Streams

The Timed Value Stream Library provides an advanced framework for instrumentation, pre-processing and recording of functional and extra-functional properties in SystemC-based virtual prototyping simulations.

This repository contains an implementation of the library described in the paper Advanced SystemC Tracing and Analysis Framework for Extra-Functional Properties, Philipp A. Hartmann, Kim Grüttner, and Wolfgang Nebel, Procceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC'15).

Abstract

System-level simulations are an important part in the design flow for today's complex systems-on-a-chip. Trade-off analysis during architectural exploration as well as run-time reconfiguration of applications and their mapping require detailed introspection of the dynamic effects on the target platform. Additionally, extra-functional properties like power consumption and performance characteristics are important metrics to assess the quality of a design. In this paper, we present an advanced framework for instrumentation, pre-processing and recording of functional and extra-functional properties in SystemC-based virtual prototyping simulations. The framework is based on a hierarchy of so-called timed value streams, allowing to address the requirements for highly configurable, dynamic architectures while allowing tailored introspection of the required system characteristics under analysis.

The full paper is available at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-16214-0_12

Build System and Dependencies

The library requires the build system meson >= 0.39. By default, meson uses the ninja backend to generate the build instructions. On debian-based systems, you can install ninja via

$ sudo apt-get install ninja-build

If meson is not available via your distribution package manager, you can install it via pip (specifically, the python3 pip variant):

$ pip3 install meson

Alternatively, you can download the archive or check out the sources from https://github.org/mesonbuild/meson and use meson.py directly. Refer to the meson website at http://mesonbuild.com/ for more information.

Library Dependencies

The library requires a compiler with C++11 support. It was successfully tested with gcc 6.3 and clang 4.0.

External dependencies:

• SystemC >= 2.3.1
• boost >= 1.51

Building the Library

To build the library, create a build directory and run meson in the new directory while pointing it to the source directory:

$ cd <path/to/libtvs>
$ mkdir objdir
$ cd objdir
$ meson ..

After configuring the build directory, you can run the build using ninja. ninja test will run the test suite.

Build Options

These are the library-specific build options:

Project options:
  Option                Description                        Current Value Possible Values
  ------                -----------                        ------------- ---------------
  enable_docs           Generate the Doxygen documentation false         [True, False]
  enable_tests          Enable building the tests          true          [True, False]
  sc_includedir         SystemC include directory
  sc_libdir             SystemC library directory

You can either directly specify the build options when configuring the build directory using meson -D<name>=<value> <...> or use mesonconf -D<name>=<value> after having configured the directory. You can also use mesonconf to inspect all available build configuration options.

Manual SystemC Dependency

The build system will search for a suitable SystemC library via pkg-config. If a pkg-config file is not available, you can optionally specify custom SystemC library and include header paths via the options -Dsc_includedir and -Dsc_libdir:

$ mkdir objdir
$ cd objdir
$ meson -Dsc_libdir=/opt/systemc-2.3.1/lib-linux64 \
      -Dsc_includedir=/opt/systemc-2.3.1/include ..

Test Suite and Documentation

By default, a test suite is built which contains unit tests and example files. The unit tests require the Google Test framework gtest. If gtest is not available on your system, meson will download and compile the dependency automatically. The build option enable_tests controls if the test suite should be built.

To enable generating the preliminary documentation using Doxygen, set enable_docs to true:

$ mesonconf -Denable_docs=true
$ ninja