Running the Application on the Board
- When the build is finished, right-click on the project in the Project Explorer and select.
Note:Be sure not to select Debug As because it will enable breakpoints. If your program breakpoints during execution, the timing will not be accurate (because the software will stop, the hardware will continue running, and the trace timer used for timestamping will continue to run).
When you click on theTrace Application (SDSoC Debugger)option, the GUI downloads the bitstream to the board followed by the application ELF, starts the application, and then begins collecting the trace data produced until the application exits. After the application finishes (or any error in collecting the trace data occurs) the trace data collected is displayed.
Note:The application must exit successfully for trace data to be collected successfully. If the application does not exit normally (i.e., hangs in hardware or software, or the Linux kernel crashes), the trace data might not be collected correctly.
- After the application exits, and all trace data is collected and displayed, you will see two main areas in the trace visualization: the event textual listing on top (yellow highlighted border), and the event timeline on the bottom (purple highlighted border). Both areas display the same information. The top textual listing orders event by time in a descending order. The bottom event timeline shows the multiple axes for each trace point in the design (either a monitor core or a region of software that is being traced).
The first thing you should notice is that the 10 iterations of the application are clearly visible as repeated groups of events. Orange events are software events, green events are accelerator events, and blue events are data transfer events.
- If the names of the trace points in the event timeline are abbreviated with an ellipsis ("...") you can expand the panel by clicking on the border between the grey on the left and the white on the right (the border turns red when you hover the cursor over the right spot), and then clicking and dragging to the right.
- If you hover the cursor over one of the events, you will see a detailed tool-tip appear displaying the detailed information about each trace. The example below shows the first accelerator event, which corresponds to the start/stop of the
mmult_accelfunction that we chose to implement in hardware (via Vivado HLS). The start time is at 0.000002070 seconds (2,070 ns) and the stop time is at 0.000038110 seconds (38,110 ns). It also shows the duration of the event (which is the runtime of the accelerator in this case) as 0.000036040 seconds (36,040 ns).
