Hardware Emulation Debug from the Vitis IDE - 2020.2 English

Versal ACAP AI Engine Programming Environment User Guide (UG1076)
Document ID
UG1076
Release Date
2020-11-24
Version
2020.2 English
To run and debug the application in the Emulation-HW build target, you must use the following steps:
  1. Start the QEMU emulation environment by selecting the Xilinx > Start/Stop Emulator command.

    This launches the emulator and then waits until Linux is booted within the QEMU. The Emulation console shows a transcript of the QEMU launch and Linux boot process. You can tell when the process has completed when the progress dialog closes and the qemu% prompt is black. You can examine the transcript for details of this process.

    When launching hardware emulation, you can specify options for the AI Engine simulator that runs the graph application, as described in Simulator Options for Hardware Emulation, The options can be specified in the Emulator Arguments field shown in the prior figure by specifying the following command: 

    -aie-sim-options ../aiesim_options.txt
  2. Right-click on the top-level system project, and select the Debug As > Launch HW Emulator command. This opens the Debug Configurations dialog box.
  3. Press Debug to proceed.

    This opens the Debug perspective in the Vitis IDE, and connects to the PS application and AI Engine graph running on their respective cores in the QEMU. The application automatically breaks at the main() function for all the ELF files.

From this point you can do all the debug activities like step in/step over/viewing variables/plant break points in the emulation environment. Refer to Using the Debug Environment for more information.