Announcing OSVVM Release 2022.05+

For some time now, OSVVM has been doing releases every month.   Sometimes I talk about them, sometimes they just get posted to the downloads page.   

Over the past several releases OSVVM has:

• Improved documentation.
• Improved our already best in industry test reporting capability.
• Improved scripting capabilities.
• Find code coverage tedious – we run, save, merge, and report it in a very simple way.

 
OSVVM is developed by the same VHDL experts who have helped develop VHDL standards. OSVVM utilities work hard so you don’t have to. Unlike other VHDL methodologies, everything we do is VHDL compliant.

Lets take a look at what has been introduced through the last couple of releases.

2022.03

A large focus of this release was updating documentation. The following highlights the 2022.03 updates.

• Added document, OSVVM’s Structured Testbench FrameWork
• Added document, OSVVM’s Verification Component Developer’s Guide
• Added links to transcript files added during a test via TranscriptOpen
• Axi4 Lite updated to resolve all GHDL issues (rebaselined to AXI Full implementation)
• AxiStream updated so that a single burst operation may use multiple calls to SendBurst
• TbUtilPkg added EdgeRose, EdgeFell, EdgeActive, FindRisingEdge, FindFallingEdge, FindActiveEdge

2022.04

This release had a continuing focus on documentation. The following highlights the 2022.04 updates.

• Added osvvm.github.io
• Updated all README files and particularly documentation
• Added document, OSVVM_Overview.pdf
• Axi4Memory Read Burst Data updated to add delay between each data word read

2022.05

For OSVVM scripts, this release focused on improving error handling and adding html simulator transcripts for non-gui based tools. The following highlights the 2022.05 updates.

• Improved error handling in simulation scripts.
• Improved transcripts for non-gui based tools – such as GHDL. Including html output.
• Added reports for analyze and simulate errors in the build summary report
• Added links to simulator transcript (log or html based) to the build summary report
• Updated all VC to have MODEL_ID_NAME and FIFOs with Search mode PRIVATE.
  This ensures that VC unique FIFOs when in generate loop and can have a unique name.

Updates to top of Build Report Summary

Over the past several releases the Build Report Summary has been updated to add the following:

• Create simulator transcript files in either html or text (log) (2022.02)
• Added links to code coverage reports, when generated via OSVVM scripts. (2022.02)
• Added reports for analyze and simulate errors (2022.05)
• Added links to simulator transcript (log or html based) (2022.05)

As a result, the top part of the build summary report now includes the following information.

Over the past several releases the Detailed Test Case Reports have been updated to add the following:

• Added html based alert reports (automatically generated by EndOfTestReports + Scripts) (2021.10)
• Added html based functional coverage reports (automatically generated by EndOfTestReports + Scripts) (2021.10)
• Added link to simulator transcript with an internal link to this test cases output (when using html reports) (2022.02)
• Added links to test case transcript files added during a test via TranscriptOpen (2022.03)
• Added scoreboard reports (automatically generated by EndOfTestReports + Scripts) (2022.02)

Viewing the Simulator Transcript as HTML

The importance of viewing the simulator transcript as html is easy to see. The html simulator transcript illuminates all of the major commands (build, include, TestSuite, library, analyze, simulate, RunTest) and allows us to scroll through them to the test case in which we are interested. The following shows part of the html simulator transcript:

Going further, each Detailed Test Case Report has a link to the html simulator transcript with a link to the results of that test case. This makes the output of analyze and simulate for a particular test easy to find.

The larger your test suite, the more important the html report becomes. For example, a full OSVVM regression run (public VC tests plus the
private Utility Library tests) runs 520 test cases and produces 170K+ lines of output. Scrolling through this as a text based log file in a text editor is confounding – on a good day. Scrolling through this as html output is tedious, but simple.

Summary

Debug is one of today’s big challenges. OSVVM’s test reporting is targeted at simplifying this task by quickly identifying the test case in error and allow us to quickly look at test results.

Through several updates OSVVM has incrementally improved our already best in industry test reporting capability. While OSVVM also offers JUnit XML reports for Continuous Integration (CI) tools, our native html capability provides a much deeper insight and simpler to understand view into the results of your test suite.