Icarus Verilog notes

Building Icarus in general

It seems to require bison 1.25-1.28 on all platforms, instead of a newer versions.

Usage Note

Version 0.7, the latest stable version, which is now several years old, requires placing $dumpfile before $dumpvars for proper operation. Also, $dumpvars must take an argument, despite what the standard says. This is supposedly fix in newer snapshots.

Newer snapshots, and the soon to be release 0.8 fix that problem

(Update) I'm now on a CVS snapshot, but I haven't yet retested the above.

Icarus on Solaris

Grab a prebuilt with SunStudio package here. Untar from /, installs into /opt/verilog-20051130.

With GCC

0.7 requires adding "#include <assert.h>" to load_module.cc to get it to build.

Newer snapshots also work, but I didn't record what was required to make them work

With SunStudio

I have moved on to the CVS version, checked out Nov 30. 2005. Previous versions could be coerced into building, but there were linking problems I never got worked out.

First thing to note is that the configure script generate problematic Makefiles. I have no clue how to fix the autoconf stuff. If anyone can help, please contact me. However, I can explain how to fix the resulting Makefiles.

  1. Nearly every Makefile has one or two lines like "mv *.d dep". The .d files are from a dependency tracking feature of GCC. Comment out or delete these lines.
  2. Almost every Makefile has a line like: CFLAGS = -Wall -g. The -Wall is another GCC specific option. Delete it.
  3. Almost every Makefile has a CPPFLAGS line that includes -fPIC. Change that to -K pic.
  4. Several places have a -shared flag. This appears in the SHARED = line, but it also appears in build rules as well. Change all of them to -G -K pic.

The source code errors fall into two catagories. The first is lines like: pow(10, ...). It doesn't know whether to use std::pow(double, int), or std::pow(float, int). Change them to be pow((double)10,....

The second set of problems has to do with trying to create instances of abstract classes. The solution is to find the source for the class it is talking about and add a line like "~Classname () { }". For instance, in the definition for PNoop (in Statement.h", add the line "~PNoop () { } ". There are two or so other places you have to make similar changes. I have brought it to the attention of the maintainer (Stephen Williams), and I hope that in the near future he will fix the source code problems.

Once you get a clean build, you should be able to just make install, and have the results work. I haven't tried running the test suite yet though.

For the lazy: Here is a prebuilt tarball. Just untar to someplace like /opt and have fun.