Migrating from Vitis HLS to the Vitis Unified IDE - 2023.2 English

Vitis High-Level Synthesis User Guide (UG1399)
Document ID
UG1399
Release Date
2023-12-18
Version
2023.2 English

Vitis HLS is being deprecated and will no longer be released in the near future. The Vitis unified IDE provides a common tool for creating the different components of a heterogeneous system design, or a Data Center accleleration application. These components include the HLS component generated from C/C++ source code. The new tool flow includes the v++ and vitis-run common comand-line for compiling and linking the system design.

The Vitis unified IDE was first introduced in the 2023.1 release, and is now the default tool flow in the 2023.2 release. The unified IDE provides a number of approaches for migrating an HLS project from Vitis HLS into the new tool. These include the following:

  1. Use an existing Vitis HLS project to create a new HLS component
  2. Use the write_ini command to export an HLS config file for use in the Vitis unified IDE
  3. Use the vitis-run command to run an existing Tcl script
Tip: If your HLS component is part of a workspace for the Vitis classic IDE, you can migrate the workspace as described in Migrating Projects from Classic IDE in Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393).

Create an HLS Component from an Exisiting Vitis HLS Project

As described in Creating an HLS Component you can specify the hls.app file from an existing Vitis HLS project to generate a new HLS config file. The tool lets you identify the hls.app file inside the project, and enter a New configuration file name for the config file generated from the hls.app file.

Tip: If you have a project with multiple solutions, the hls.app file identifies the solutions and the HLS Component Creation wizard will prompt you to specify which of the available solutions you want to import. Using this feature you can create separate HLS components for each solution in the project.

Use write_ini to create an HLS Config File

The Vitis HLS tool also has the ability to create a config file from an existing Tcl script using the write_ini command. To use this feature simply add the write_ini output.cfg with whatever options are needed to create the needed config file.

Launch Vitis HLS in interactive mode and then specify the write_ini command to export the Tcl commands used to create a project, or a specific solution. 

vitis_hls -i
vitis_hls>write_ini output.cfg -appfile project/hls.app
-or- 
vitis_hls>write_ini output.cfg -apsfile project/solution/solution.aps

After creating the HLS config files from the project or solutions, you can use these confi files along with the specified source files to recreate th Vitis HLS project as an HLS component in the Vitis unified IDE.

Use vitis-run to run an Existing Tcl Script

To use an existing Tcl script to generate an Vitis HLS project, you can use the vitis-run command as described in vitis, v++, and vitis-run Commands:

vitis-run --mode hls --tcl script.tcl