A scriptable, standards-compliant reporting and logging extension for SystemC

Abstract

The shift towards more and more complex System-on-Chips fosters high-level modeling (HLM) of new systems in order to provide required time-to-first-virtual-prototype and adequate simulation speed. Using HLM furthermore allows running exhaustive simulations are, enabling the developer to gain a plethora of information from the system during simulation. Reporting, logging, analyzing, and interpreting this vast amount of data requires a potent report and logging system. This paper proposes such a solution: the presented system is build on the foundations of SystemC's sc_report class and maintains full compatibility with it. To provide extensive search and analysis features, the proposed solution features Python-based scripting capabilities and supports attached key-value pairs to each report message. Using highly efficient black- and whitelisting filters empowers the user to reported events during runtime and suppresses all irrelevant reports in order to achieve fast simulation. Filter rules are fully scriptable and interpreted during simulation runtime, allowing dynamic adaption of the rules based on events occurred. All proposed mechanisms were evaluated under real-world conditions in an existing virtual prototype platform, including a report database backend, enabling easy analysis of the generated data.