The Power & Limitations of Verilator | Kay Li

[@BGBTech]

For testing my hobby CPU core, I have mostly been using Verilator to good effect (and only occasionally get around to running on an actual FPGA), but thus far it mostly works OK. Though, I also make fairly heavy use of an instruction set level emulator, as it can run programs at roughly the same speeds they would run on the FPGA, whereas Verilator is several orders of magnitude slower. But, I can also note that I don't use any 3rd party logic or modules (and pretty much no budget; as my CPU/ISA is a single-person hobby project), ... I don't think I have done too badly though (and it can pass the "does it run Doom?" test at least). Nevermind the seemingly never ending battle with deficiencies and bugs on the software side of things (the "OS" I am running on it still falls well short of a real OS; and porting another more mainstream OS to my custom ISA seems like a fairly big effort; as I am also using a non-mainstream C compiler, with binaries based on a modified PE/COFF, etc...).