freehdl

[legacy]

Does anyone use it?
here it's bugged 

downloaded the last feehdl.0.0.8.tar.gz
untarballed
configured
compiled
installed (into /usr/local)

tried some example in the project folder
(thus, inside freehdl.0.0.8
i created a folder my)

Code: [Select]

gvhdl -c adder.vhdl
gvhdl top.vhdl adder.o ../ieee/std_logic_1164.o

all compiled without errors
but it doesn't work at all!

Code: [Select]

./top
Sorry, only default component binding is currently supported. No default binding for component adder found!

UAT? 

tried to sort it our putting everything in the same file

Code: [Select]

echo            > all.vhdl
cat adder.vhdl >> all.vhdl
cat top.vhal   >> all.vhdl
gvhdl all.vhdl ../ieee/std_logic_1164.o

but it fails again

Code: [Select]

./all
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc
Aborted

UAT? 

[legacy]

This kind of tool might be interesting when you have to use linux on a POWER9 machine (e.g. Talos-2, 2017) and ghdl can't be compiled because there is no GNAT support for IBM-POWER processors.

But I can't actually understand what's wrong with freehdl and which is the state of art of this tool.

The documentation is inconsistently poor 

[legacy]

sources: freehdl-0.0.8.tar.gz 

[Bruce Abbott]

sources: freehdl-0.0.8.tar.gz 

"The requested URL /~enaroska/freehdl-0.0.8.tar.gz was not found on this server."

[legacy]

try this mirror.

[legacy]

it would be interesting having VHDL-AMS implementation

[Canis Dirus Leidy]

This kind of tool might be interesting when you have to use linux on a POWER9 machine (e.g. Talos-2, 2017) and ghdl can't be compiled because there is no GNAT support for IBM-POWER processors.

By the way. New ghdl versions can be compiled with LLVM instead of GNAT.

[legacy]

By the way. New ghdl versions can be compiled with LLVM instead of GNAT.

Yup, but it doesn't work as expected once compiled: e.g. all the foreign C support DOES NOT work 

tried v0.30..v0.33

[legacy]

v0.29 is the only stable version

trying the last version on the git repository ends this way

also on HPPA

Code: [Select]

./configure --with-llvm-config
Sorry, you need GNAT to build GHDL

WTF 

[Bruce Abbott]

WTF

What did you expect? The whole concept is flawed from the beginning anyway.

But this is just the way it is in software development today. Crap piled on top of crap and wrapped in more crap - all because programmers are too lazy.

 

[legacy]

well ... I spent two days on this problem, and four hours testing GHDL from v30 to v34. Our internal linux distribution is based on Gentoo's catalyst and portage, and it happens that someone in Gentoo has recently removed GHDL from the portage for *unclear* internal reasons.

Now, consider that v30 requires GNAT-v4.9, which is problematic to be built on gcc-v5 profile and consider that the last glibc makes the multi-profile pretty broken, so I spent more time in regressions on chroots and virtual machines, and at the end I have discovered that all the new GHDL versions are *ONLY* partially working: they compile vhdl, but looking at my test-benches they have some strange bad internal problem (segmentation fault without a message) with foreign-C code! It's not acceptable since is a wanted feature!

I have tried different approaches without getting any good result! Debugging GCC and ADA is ... impossible for me!

Thus I have to write in my report that "v30-v34 are all not acceptable", as well as I have to require a couple of Overlay-folders in the customer server to host GNAT-v4.3 and GHDL-v0.29, both OLD-VERSION out of the portage!

So, at the end, I had to do a partial regression of both GNAT and GHDL, rewriting the overlay as private overlay, and adapt it to suit the new environment!

It's a shitty job! Irritating if we consider that a lot of problems were related to patches that were committed 1 year ago and ... ignored (why ignored? why? EGO problem? bah ...)

and to customers asking

- "oh, I'd like to put 5-7K euro in a IBM-Power9 Octocores machine, can *YOU* compile GNAT or somethingHDL for linux/POWER?!?" -

well .... 

I will have to say them that it's pretty like a basket of pine cones!

I have tried, fixed, tried again, and I am ending with a simple answer to my customer: sorry, it's not possible, it doesn't work!

As far as GHDL as "opensource free (no money to pay) alternative", tomorrow I have to meet a couple of managers and I will have to explain them that they have to put more money in the project in order to buy a couple of license for ModelSim as well as two i9-workstations, since it's my personal opinion that trying to sort out problems with GHDL will end in costing more money in consultancies!


edit:
and GHDL is not fully thread safe. You need a modified version since the default source-code causes weird behaviour 

[Bruce Abbott]

I have tried, fixed, tried again, and I am ending with a simple answer to my customer: sorry, it's not possible, it doesn't work!

As far as GHDL as "opensource free (no money to pay) alternative", tomorrow I have to meet a couple of managers and I will have to explain them that they have to put more money in the project in order to buy a couple of license for ModelSim as well as two i9-workstations, since it's my personal opinion that trying to sort out problems with GHDL will end in costing more money in consultancies!

That sounds like the best solution. When customers are willing to pay real money it's time to give up on 'open source' software which has no support and no guarantee of quality. If they want to port it themselves then that is their business...

In my current job we are using 'open source' software to control UAVs. Right now it's just a research project so I don't mind the poor documentation and a few bugs. However we bought a new autopilot which requires different 'open source' software that was having problems on a Windows 10 tablet. I looked into recompiling from source and it was a nightmare - I figured it would take me a month just to set up the environment and get familiar with the various frameworks used (with something like this you don't make changes unless you know exactly what you are doing!).