Getting started

The following are a minimal set of instruction on getting started with RTLMeter.

Cloning from Git

Start by cloning the repository, then cd to the root of the project:

git clone https://github.com/verilator/rtlmeter.git rtlmeter

cd rtlmeter

Setting up dependencies

We assume you have Python 3.10 or newer available through your shell $PATH as python3. To confirm, you can run python3 --version.

Python dependencies are manged through a virtual environment that you can set up automatically by running the following command once, after cloning or updating the repository:

make venv

This sets up a Python virtual environment in the venv subdirectory, and installs the dependencies listed in python-requirements.txt. There is no need to activate or otherwise add the virtual environment from venv to your shell environment. If necessary, it is safe to remove the venv directory, or re-run make venv (e.g.: when changing the version of a Python, or a required package).

Verilator is picked up from the shell $PATH. To check you have verilator available, run which verilator. Otherwise please see the Verilator manual for instructions on how to install Verilator. Verilator 5.002 or later is required.

Invocation

All operations are invoked via the rtlmeter command line executable. You can view the subcommands via ./rtlmeter --help, and the command-line help for each subcommand using ./rtlmeter <SUBCOMMAND> --help.

For a quick smoke test, run:

./rtlmeter run --cases OpenTitan:default:hello
./rtlmeter report

This will take about 2 minutes to finish, and will compile and execute the OpenTitan:default:hello case, then print some of the recorded metrics.

Note

If the previous run command have failed, remove the work subdirectory or add --retry before re-running. The detailed section on running RTLMeter explains why this is necessary.

To see the effect of running the same case using 2 threads, and compare the results with the single threaded version run above, you can use:

./rtlmeter run --cases OpenTitan:default:hello --compileArgs="--threads 2" --workRoot work-2t
./rtlmeter compare work work-2t

For further usage information please see the rest of the User Guide.