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2023-06-07
One thing when you work on your own little project is that you don't always build it as well as it can be. After all, if it 'works on your machine™', then you're less inclined to architecture it in a way that is more portable or cross-platform.
As I started putting together the sample code for openFPGA Tutorials, I had to improve my little build system for pfCore in order to make it more re-usable with other projects. Up to now I had put together a collection of Python scripts held together by a Makefile. It required pointing to a cloned repo for Intel's IP so the whole thing wasn't really user-friendly. As the Makefile was calling some shell commands it wasn't very portable to other OSes either. I had to find a cleaner solution.
I've always been fond of build systems and I've used a few in my days, Make or CMake for example. One that we used for while when we started making Daxter was SCons. This is, in fact, where I cut my teeth on Python and started falling in love with the language. I put together a build system for both the code and game assets back then but eventually we moved away from SCons because the project had become too large for it and build times were too long, especially when nothing needed to be built.
I you remember one of the ideas behind the tools for Project Freedom was to use Python as much as possible. I'm not sure why I didn't remember SCons but when it came time to replace my Makefile stuff with something more portable, it suddenly clicked and I decided to port the build system to SCons. The beauty of it all is that both the Python scripts AND the build system can be encapsulated into one Python module. You install the module and you're ready to build. Well... almost... the system still needs Docker and I don't really have a way to automate that dependency yet.
So all this turned into pf-dev=tools. It's easy to install:
pip install pf-dev-tools
and the SConstruct (equivalent to a Makefile for SCons) for a simple openFPGA core is also quite simple:
import pfDevTools
# -- We need pf-dev-tools version 1.x.x but at least 1.0.2.
pfDevTools.requires('1.0.2')
env = pfDevTools.Environment(PF_CORE_TEMPLATE_REPO_TAG='v.0.0.3_for_pfCore')
env.OpenFPGACore('src/config.toml')
The Python module also comes with the `pf` command which lets you easily build the project:
pf make
or even install it on your SD card:
pf install
Just about everything is automated: cloning the core template repo, listing the `.v` and `.sv` verilog files found in the `src` folder and adding them to the Quartus project, compiling the bitstream using a Docker image and packaging the core into a `.zip` file. Installing then copies the content of the zip file in the right spots.
Everything in the build system is in Python. No need to mess with another language or file format like Make or CMake. Everything just works.
The `pf` commands has quite a few more tricks up its sleeve. More info on this and on the core building toolchain can be found in the README file for pfDevTools.
One last added bonus of switching to a all-Python build system is that it has made the entire thing very portable. My development environment is macOS based so my main focus is making sure it works on that but it's nice to know other can use the same thing on Linux or Windows too.
That's actually what got me started on porting the whole thing to SCons. Someone using Windows wanted to try it and I knew that making the switch would give me cross-platform support while making the whole system better.
Sometimes worrying about how your stuff could be used by others helps you improve it in ways you wouldn't have if it was just for you.
With ❤️ from Paris, France.