[libre-riscv-dev] Debug port (was Re: minimum viable ASIC)

[Staf Verhaegen]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton schreef op vr 08-05-2020 om 23:19 [+0100]:
> ---crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
> 
> On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 6:23 PM Staf Verhaegen <staf at fibraservi.eu> wrote:
> 
> ah.  as a software engineer, the practice of using wildcard imports isan extremely bad one.  i strongly advocate *not* getting into thehabit of doing "from nmigen import *" everywhere - it will make yourlife - and other users lives - absolute hell when it comes to tryingto track and debug code.
> minerva has a JTAG interface as well.  i corrected the practice ofusing "import *" in this one

Would 'import nmigen as nm' work for you?I did not touch code for a few months and in the mean time I do use a more PEP compliant code style. But I am annoyed by the individual list of things to import. For nmigen or Hurricane there is typically a few lines of these includes. When I change for example a Pad to a Rectilinear I may have to update the import list. I don't see value add of this and it annoys me a lot.So I am thinking of switching to 'import Hurricane as hur' and 'import nmigen as nm'To me the only valid reason for not using wild cards is that a later wild card import may replace something you did import before; this is avoided by namespacing the import with 'import ... as ...'.
> it looks like the minerva team got a long way with that.  alsoprovided a wishbone master interface:
> https://git.libre-soc.org/?p=soc.git;a=blob;f=src/soc/minerva/units/debug/wbmaster.py;h=db02af95b4eb3ef8ac25b348f3abaa2bcbe7d96f;hb=a54adcb65bad37b398b11e33a824c7d08c5fe509

That code seems to focus on the debugging protocol over the JTAG interface the lower level part seems to be missing.In debug/top.py:...
# FIXME: figure out where JTAGTap is
# from jtagtap import JTAGTap


class JTAGTap:
    def __init__(self):
        raise NotImplementedError(
            "jtagtap package not found: figure out where JTAGTap is")
...

My JTAG interface does actually the low level part, the protocol has to be done by the user on top of it. I do think I have a flexible way of adding extra shift registers and jtag commands. I also do provide boundary scan for the IO pins which should make PCB testing much easier (BTW, this was actually the original use case for JTAG).
greets,Staf.