On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 15:52:24 +0200
alb <
alessand...@cern.ch> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> this is another attempt to switch to a completely batched mode to manage
> my vhdl projects. The rationale behind is that I'd like to get a
> directory structure for my projects that is tool independent and I'd
> like to use Makefiles to handle vhdl dependencies and development phases
> (simulation, synthesis, p&r, ...).
>
> I have read several articles on this subject but none of them was
> presenting an end-to-end flow for an example design and I every time
> struggled a lot trying to put everything together [1].
>
> I know about 'vmk' tool, but to be honest I haven't found any additional
> information on top of the man page. If anyone here is regularly using it
> I'd appreciate some examples.
>
> At Cern it has been developed an 'hdlmake' tool to generate makefiles
> and much more (like downloading stuff from remote repositories or
> launching simulations/synthesis on remote servers), but to be honest I
> prefer tools that "do one thing and to it well".
>
> I know that OpenCores.org is striving for a standard structure for
> projects and it qualifies some of them as 'Certified Projects' (OCCP) if
> they obey to certain rules, including having make-scripts. But to be
> honest I lost my way several times in the past.
>
> Any suggestion/comment is welcome.
>
I've seen those same tools, and given them brief consideration, but at
the end of the day I go back to GNU make. I don't want some
specialized make tool that cares whether I'm writing HDL, C, or
anything else.
That said, dependencies are a horror, and I've found no consistent way
to do it across target platforms; my Xilinx makefiles look entirely
different than my Altera ones, and both of them have serious
limitations relating the source files to the project. The Altera stuff
is particularly touchy; I've found that in order to do anything
meaningful with makefiles I wind up needing to have supplemental Tcl
scripts that my makefile calls through quartus_sh.
--
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology --
www.highlandtechnology.com
Email address domain is currently out of order. See above to fix.