Missing command

[Simon149]

Hi I am working on adding a new IP to Pulpissimo.
I found this training from this issue.
pulp-platform/pulpissimo#272

Unfortunately, it's one year ago and pulpissimo has removed ./update-ips command in the makefile.
I can't generate ips or pulp_soc with the latest version of pulpissimo.
What should I do for this training?

[meggiman]

Hi @Simon149,

That is correct, we moved from IPApprox (update_ips script) to Bender as our dependency management tool. You can find the documentation how to use this tool on the bender repositories README. It basically makes use of the Bender.yml files in each repository to determine the project dependencies and source files (similar to what we previously used the ips_list.yml and src_files.yml files for). I strongly suggest you read the REAMDE of the Bender repo before continuing with the below workflow.

By default, bender checks out every IP in a hidden directory (.bender/git/checkout). You must not change the content of this directory
If you want to modify an IP, the flow is basically to:

1. call bender clone <some IP name e.g. pulp_soc>. This will clone the IP you named in a new directory called working_dir. Also, the command creates an entry in the Bender.local (if it didn't exist before it will be created for you) file to let bender know that you want to override the existing dependency (which pointed to the pulp_soc github repo) to point to the newly created local working copy instead.
2. Afterwards, you have to regenerate the compile scripts to point to your newly generated working copy. PULPissimo has a make target for this: make scripts (this internally calls bender script vsim to generate scripts for Questasim but bender also support various other output formats).
3. You can now modify your working copy of e.g. pulp_soc in the working dir, add new IPs (you can register them in the Bender.yml file of pulp_soc which acts a bit like the older ips_list.yml and src_files.yml combined. If you register new dependencies in a Bender.yml file, you have to call bender update and then regenerate your compile scripts as before.
4. Commit your changes to pulp_soc in working dir.
5. Once you are done with all modifications, push your commits, remove the entry in Bender.local and update e.g. the pulp_soc entry in Bender.yml to point to your own fork of the repo and also to the right version.

One important difference between Bender and the older IPApprox is that Bender supports automatic version conflict resolution. During the conflict resolution, the tool tries to find a version that is supposedly compatible with all the dependent IPs. The result of this conflict resolution is stored in a file called Bender.lock. For each IP in the entire SoC, this file stores the exact version of an IP that is currently in use. It is advisable to save (i.e. commit this file) into your git repository once you have a stable version. That way you get reproducible builds. You can use the bender checkout command to ask bender to checkout every IP using the exact version stored in the saved Bender.lock file. The regular bender update on the other hand reruns dependency resolution and IP lookup and might not yield the same results if you call it at a later time (e.g. because you pointed it to some branch of pulp_soc and that branch got new commits since you last ran bender update.

I hope this helps. If you have any other questions, please let me know.
Best,
Manuel