4

I am using a VCD file generated by iverilog with gtkwave. There is a button present in the GUI, but I would like to reload the wave window from the command line. How would I go about that?

user7426532
  • 93
  • 2
  • 7
  • After you've stored the save file containing set-ups and a reference to a waveform dump file you can invoke gtkwave via command line passing it the name of the savefile. It will open a new tab to the right of the existing tab (which you can optionally close). A tab consists of a signal search subwindow, a signal subwindow, and a wave subwindow. See the PDF [documentation](http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/gtkwave.pdf), particularly Appendix A: Command Line Options Reference. –  Jul 13 '17 at 02:34

2 Answers2

3

You can run gtkwave in interactive mode, but this requires that your simulator is additive. Basically, your keeping the same previous data but adding additional data that has been collected. To do this, you add the "interactive" switch and you need to FIFO in the data.

From the user manual

Interactive VCD VCD files may be viewed as they are generated provided that they are written to a fifo (pipe) and are trampolined through shmidcat first (assume the simulator will normally generate outfile.vcd):

mkfifo outfile.vcd
cver myverilog.v &
shmidcat outfile.vcd | gtkwave ­v ­I myverilog.sav

You can then navigate the file as simulation is running and watch it update.

Rich Maes
  • 1,204
  • 1
  • 12
  • 29
0

Someone on the GTKWave mailing list actually asked this same question a few years ago. It turns out that you can make GTKWave reload using gconftool2, of all things:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /com.geda.gtkwave/0/reload 0

Running the above command will cause GTKWave to reload the current waveform (as opposed to enabling some kind of auto-reload option, which you would think would be the case given that GConf is a configuration system).

fouric
  • 1,598
  • 1
  • 19
  • 37
  • thank you very much for your reply and providing the link. While this works for Linux, I was wondering if something similar exists for macOS, since I am mostly using GTKwave there. – user7426532 Nov 28 '17 at 11:04
  • @user7426532: Happy to help! Unfortunately, I can't find any information on the internet that suggests that GConf has been ported to macOS, and because it's currently being deprecated, it probably won't ever be. Fortunately, because it's being replaced with dconf, there might be a port to macOS during the transition. For now, though, you're stuck with Rich Maes' answer. – fouric Nov 28 '17 at 19:23