Covered - FAQ
Author: Trevor Williams

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User Manual - «Covered»
|  |  | 13 FAQ
|  |  | This page contains a list of accummulated Frequently Asked Questions. If you are having difficulties using Covered or have questions that are not answered in the User's Guide, please check this list for answers. If you do not find the information that you are looking for in the User's Guide or this FAQ, please send an e-mail to:
|  |  | Trevor Williams
| Question |  | Is a CDD file generated from a newer version of Covered compatible with a CDD file generated from an older version?
|  |  | The answer to this question is, "Well, that depends...". Since the format of the CDD file is only used by Covered, the contents and format of this file may be changed to suit the needs of Covered. This means that it is possible for a CDD file created from an older version of Covered to be incompatible with a newer version. Additionally, the developers of Covered will not make any attempts to make sure that older CDD files can be properly read by a newer version of Covered. It is suggested that any CDD files generated from a particular version of Covered be merged and/or reported on by that same version, and if Covered is upgraded, new CDD files should be generated.
|  |  | This being said, it is also a possibility that between versions of Covered a "backwards compatibility" may be maintained if a change to this file's format is not required.
| Question |  | When I run the score command, Covered seems to take a long time to run. Is there anything that I can do to speed up scoring?
|  |  | While Covered is continuously being enhanced to provide better performance for all commands (especially the score command), it may still take a while to complete scoring if one or more of the following is true:
|  |  | The design being scored is sufficiently large The VCD/LXT dumpfile is sufficiently large The VCD/LXT dumpfile contains dump information for a part of the design not being scored
| 1. |  | If reason (1) is true, speeding up each run can be achieved by one of the following suggestions:
|  |  | Reduce the scored design in size by eliminating modules or constructs from its design tree. (See Section 9.3 Specifying What To Cover for more information on how to accomplish this) Split up the design into smaller parts along module boundaries and generate coverage for those parts. Note: it is not currently possible to append these modules into one file. Merging and reporting must be done on these smaller pieces independently from one another.
| 2. |  | If reason (2) is true, nothing can be done except to shorten the run time of the diagnostics to produce shorter dumpfiles.
| 3. |  | If reason (3) is true, the $dumpvars call in the simulator should be modified to only generate VCD/LXT dump information for the modules included in scoring. If there are modules not being scored which are included in the $dumpvars calls, please remove these unnecessary modules from dumpfile output.
|  |  | If you believe that you have a situation which is void of these prevailing reasons and Covered is still running slowly, please send an e-mail to me. I will consider these problems to be of lower priority than actual bugs but will look into the situation to see where code can be optimized.
| Question |  | I get an assertion error when running Covered, what should I do?
|  |  | Covered uses C assertions to make sure that internal pointers are not be referenced when NULL and that certain internal situations do not arise. If you receive some type of assertion error when running Covered, it means that something went wrong internally in Covered. The error is NOT due to user error. Please submit a bug report containing the assertion error message, file and line number. Additionally, run the Covered command with the -D global option (covered -D <command>) and provide the output from doing this with the bug report (please only specify tail of output if the output is too lengthy).
|  |  | If Covered provides any other type of error message (something other than a core dump), Covered has found a user error that must be fixed by the user. Please do not submit bug reports if these errors are encountered, unless you wish to add a question about it to the FAQ.
| Question |  | Covered is giving me a parser error for Verilog code that seems to be syntactically correct. What is wrong?
|  |  | If Covered displays a syntax (parse) error during the score command and the Verilog code is written correctly, it is because Covered's parser is incomplete. Please submit a bug or send an e-mail containing a code snippet of the unsupported Verilog.
| Question |  | Is Covered's Verilog parser Verilog-2001 compliant?
|  |  | This is currently being worked on. The parser should properly parse all code; however, not all Verilog-2001 constructs are considered for coverage due to lack of support for them in Covered's core. If there is code that will not parse that should, please submit a bug report for this.
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