On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > Hi all, > > I am a former hardware engineer who has spent the last 5 years > doing software. I've recently come back to hardare (specifically > FPGA design) and I'm playing with iverilog and gtkwave. > > Damn, I'm impressed. This stuff is really good! Much better > than having to work on windoze. > > I do however have a couple of questions about gtkwave: > > - What is the current development status, how is it progressing > and how many people work on it?
2.x is shelved as that team all received their Ph.D's, but 1.3 is ongoing. I'm the only person officially working on it, but have received some fairly considerable patches and adds from various users. > - Would it be possible to have another file menu item (say Reload > current VCD) which would keep the current viewed signals but > reload the current VCD file? That way I could fix a bug in my > simulation, re-run it and not have to go in and select my > signals again. It's possible, but currently it's not done as non-trivial traces (e.g., SoC simulation runs) would require more effort to free up than to respawn the viewer and reload a new trace. Unfortunately, reloads wouldn't work with database formats as those can't be overwritten in mid-access as the whole trace isn't memory resident and needs to load off disc as needed. > - Would it be possible for gtkwave to automatically reload the > VCD file when the file changes on disk? Many text editors > do this and its a nice feature. Again, it's possible, but the general intent was for post-mortem analysis. I rarely use VCD for serious work as those files simply consume too much memory. -Tony
