Dinotrace

by Wilson Snyder

Summary

Dinotrace is a X-11 waveform viewer which understands Verilog Value Change Dumps, ASCII, and other trace formats. It allows placing cursors, highlighting signals, searching, printing, and other capabilities superior to may commercial waveform viewers.

Dinotrace comes with a interface to GNU Emacs-21 which allows source code and log files to be annotated with the values of signals.

Dinotrace is optimized for rapid debugging. With &VTRACE;, a simulation failure will automatically place cursors where errors occur, add comments visible in the wave form viewer. Four mouse clicks and the errors will be highlighted in the log files, and the values of signals at the error will be seen in the source.

Documentation

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Docs - Documentation, as distributed with Dinotrace

Register - Get mail when Dinotrace gets updated

Prerequisites -- Unix

Dinotrace is a C program that is normally built before being used. It requires:

• Motif Widgets or the public-domain version, LessTIF, including development headers.
• A X11 server, such as the commercial programs Exceed, or the shareware MI/X
• gunzip, tar, make for installing the distribution

Prerequisites -- Windows NT

Dinotrace comes with a Windows NT executable that may also be rebuilt with the included sources. As it is still a X11 program, it requires:

• Cygwin32 GNU/Unix under Windows environment, http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/ (Version beta 20.1 is known to work, it's probably called full.exe under their site.)
• LessTIF and X11R6.4 or similar http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/ Probably called x11r6.4-cygwin-b20.1.tar.gz
• gunzip, tar, make for installing the distribution

Further instructions are described in distribution under the INSTALL file.

Tested On

Dinotrace builds on Solaris, SunOs, Digital Unix, Linux, and Windows NT. Previous versions built on Alpha VMS, VAX VMS, and Ultrix. It should be relatively easy to compile on other systems if GCC is used.

Download

• dinotrace-9.3a.tar.gz (562KB, Jun 14 2005)
• dinotrace-9.2b.tar.gz (561KB, May 3 2005)

IMPORTANT: The documentation under the Help menu may not show the entire file if you are running older versions of LessTIF. Be sure to look at dinotrace.txt!

Installation

See INSTALL with the distribution for detailed information.

• Ungzip and untar the program (it will make a subdirectory)

  gunzip dinotrace.tar.gz
  tar xvf dinotrace.tar.gz
  

• Configure to build a makefile

  cd dinotrace-*
  ./configure
  

• Make

  make
  

• Test the build

  dinotrace traces/ascii.tra
  

• Install

  make install