1 Using HCL2D
2 Our flavor of HCL
3 Built-in functionality of the simulators
- 3.1 View 1: Wires and constants
- 3.2 View 2: provided components
4 Less-common Options
- 4.1 Running code the hard way
- 4.2 Shortcuts
5 License and Copyright

You can download hcl2d.tar here.

Using HCL2D

Setup

When you first untar hcl2d.tar (with tar xvf hcl2d.tar{.bash}), enter the hcl2d directory and run make{.bash} with no arguments. If you get any error messages, see Installation of D from lab 0.

Running `.hlc` on `.yo`

To test tiny.hcl on y86/alu.yo,

Make sure you are in the hcl2d directory; the Makefile depends on this
Make sure tiny.hcl is also in the hcl2d directory
Run
```
make tiny.exe
./tiny.exe y86/alu.yo
```
You can also give tiny.exe various flags, like -q and -i; running ./tiny.exe{.bash} with no arguments will list the permitted flags.

Visualizing `.hcl` with graphviz

On the lab machines

To visualize the logic used in tiny.hcl on a linux box with graphviz installed,

Make sure you are in the hcl2d directory; the Makefile depends on this
Make sure tiny.hcl is also in the hcl2d directory

Run

make tiny.exe
dot -Tpng -O tiny_hcl.dot
eog tiny_hcl.dot.png

make tiny.exe
make tiny_hcl.png
eog tiny_hcl.dot.png

On any machine with a web browser

To visualize the logic used in tiny.hcl without graphviz

Make sure you are in the hcl2d directory; the Makefile depends on this
Make sure tiny.hcl is also in the hcl2d directory
Run make tiny.exe{.bash}
In a browser, go to wilkes.cs.virginia.edu/dotme/ and upload tiny_hcl.dot

On any machine with a command line

To visualize the logic used in tiny.hcl without graphviz

Make sure you are in the hcl2d directory; the Makefile depends on this
Make sure tiny.hcl is also in the hcl2d directory
Run make tiny.exe{.bash}

Upload using curl

curl -F file=@tiny_hcl.dot http://wilkes.cs.virginia.edu/dotme/ -o tiny_hcl.svg

…which creates an image file tiny_hcl.svg.

On a web IDE like cloud9 or koding

Run sudo apt-get install graphviz once
Thereafter the directions for lab machines should work

Turning a `.ys` into `.yo`

To turn toy.ys into toy.yo,

Make sure you are in either the hcl2d directory or the hcl2d/y86; the Makefile depends on this
Run make toy.yo{.bash}

Seeing what a `.yo` file is supposed to do

In the tools folder is a program called yis; running this on a yo file will show a summary of its correct results.

      ./tools/yis y86/alu.yo

Our flavor of HCL

We use a variant of HCL we created that is similar to, but not the same as, the book’s variant.

Like the book’s flavor, our HCL has muxes with [ condition : value; ] syntax; comparisons (==, <, etc), boolean (&&, !, ||) and set membership (x in {y,z}) operators.

Muxes may not be placed inside other muxes.

Unlike the book’s flavor, we declare things differently:

You can define as many constants as you want; e.g. const PI = 3;
Wires are declared with a particular bit width, like wire tmp:4;, not with “int”.
Wires cannot be intialized on the same line they are declared.

You can use binary (e.g. 0b01010011) as well as decimal and hex. Unlike decimal and hex, binary numbers have a width which must match the width of the wires they are assigned to, so

wire tmp:4;
tmp = 0b10;   # this is an ERROR; two-bit value does not match 4-bit destination
tmp = 0b0010; # this is OK - a four-bit value into a four-bit destination
tmp = 2;      # this is also OK - decimal does not have bit-width
tmp = 0x0002; # this is also OK - hexadecimal does not have bit-width

You can define your own register banks
- register fE { hi:3 = 2; there:5 = 0; } defines a register bank.
  - It contains two registers, hi (3 bits wide) and there (five bits wide).
  - fE gives the input and output names; they must be a lowercase letter and an uppercase letter
  - f_hi = 5; puts 5 on the input wire for register hi
  - ... = E_hi; reads the output wire from register hi
  - If you set bubble_E = true, inputs are ignored and hi will be set to 2, there to 0
  - If you set stall_E = true, inputs are ignored and outputs will remain as-is

Unlike the book’s flavor, we also have more operators:

A bit-slicing operator: if tmp = 0b010111 then tmp[1..4] is 0b011 and tmp[0..1] is the low-order bit of tmp (a 1). Index 0 is the low-order bit.
You can concatenate fixed-width values (wires, registers, binary literals, and the result of the slice operator); for example (0b0101 .. 0b01101) is 0b010101101. The parentheses are required.
You can include C math operators in your expressions

Order of code usually does not matter: all statements are executed in parallel and shuffling the order of lines in your code does not change your code’s meaning. As an exception to this rule, the cases of a mux are evaluated in order, so [ x==1 : 3; true : 4 ] will have different values if x is 1 than if it is not, but [ true: 4; x==1 : 3 ] will always evaluate to 4, no matter the value of x. Similarly, non-commutative operators like - and <= have the same order-dependent meaning in HCL2D that they have in C.

Additionally, HCL2D tries to estimate the overall clock delay of your code and displays that when run.

Built-in functionality of the simulators

Part of the goal of this flavor of HCL was to give greater freedom to re-wire what in the textbook author’s version was built-in functionality. However, we still provide hard-wired some components, such as memory and the register file.

View 1: Wires and constants

This section and the following section contain the same information, but presented in a different way.

The simulator provides the following built-in signals and constants, as can be verified by inspecting the first few lines of tools/hcl2d.d:

          ###################### begin builtin signals ##########################

### constants:

const STAT_BUB = 0b000, STAT_AOK = 0b001, STAT_HLT = 0b010;  # expected behavior
const STAT_ADR = 0b011, STAT_INS = 0b100, STAT_PIP = 0b110;  # error conditions

const REG_RAX = 0b0000, REG_RCX = 0b0001, REG_RDX = 0b0010, REG_RBX = 0b0011;
const REG_RSP = 0b0100, REG_RBP = 0b0101, REG_RSI = 0b0110, REG_RDI = 0b0111;
const REG_R8  = 0b1000, REG_R9  = 0b1001, REG_R10 = 0b1010, REG_R11 = 0b1011;
const REG_R12 = 0b1100, REG_R13 = 0b1101, REG_R14 = 0b1110, REG_NONE= 0b1111;

# icodes; see figure 4.2
const HALT   = 0b0000, NOP    = 0b0001, RRMOVQ = 0b0010, IRMOVQ = 0b0011;
const RMMOVQ = 0b0100, MRMOVQ = 0b0101, OPQ    = 0b0110, JXX    = 0b0111;
const CALL   = 0b1000, RET    = 0b1001, PUSHQ  = 0b1010, POPQ   = 0b1011;
const CMOVXX = RRMOVQ;

# ifuns; see figure 4.3
const ALWAYS = 0b0000, LE   = 0b0001, LT   = 0b0010, EQ   = 0b0011;
const NE     = 0b0100, GE   = 0b0101, GT   = 0b0110;
const ADDQ   = 0b0000, SUBQ = 0b0001, ANDQ = 0b0010, XORQ = 0b0011;

### fixed-functionality inputs (things you should assign to in your HCL)

wire Stat:3;              # should be one of the STAT_... constants
wire pc:64;               # put the address of the next instruction into this

wire reg_srcA:4, reg_srcB:4;         # use to pick which program registers to read from
wire reg_dstE:4, reg_dstM:4;         # use to pick which program registers to write to
wire reg_inputE:64, reg_inputM:64;   # use to provide values to write to program registers

wire mem_writebit:1, mem_readbit:1;  # set at most one of these two to 1 to access memory
wire mem_addr:64;                    # if accessing memory, put the address accessed here
wire mem_input:64;                   # if writing to memory, put the value to write here

### fixed-functionality outputs (things you should use but not assign to)

wire i10bytes:80;                    # output value of instruction read; linked to pc
wire reg_outputA:64, reg_outputB:64; # values from registers; linked to reg_srcA and reg_srcB
wire mem_output:64;                  # value read from memory; linked to mem_readbit and mem_addr

####################### end builtin signals ###########################

    
  

Because these are provided, they cannot be redeclared in your files but can (and should) be used to interact with the register file, memory system, and to tell the simulator when to halt your program.

View 2: provided components

This section and the preceding section contain the same information, but presented in a different way.

There are several built-in components; they have built-in names and you have to use those names to interact with them. We do not use the same names as the textbook in part because the book sometimes uses the same name for 2+ things. For example, the book uses valM to be both the output of data memory and one of the write-inputs to the register file. The block above lists all of our names; we repeat them below by component.

Instruction Memory

The input to the instruction memory is called pc. pc is a 64-bit number and is treated as containing a memory address from which to read an instruction.

The output of the instruction memory is called i10bytes. i10bytes is an 80-bit number and contains the little-endian value read from memory at the address specified in pc.

Typically we want to split out parts of i10bytes. We do this with the “slice” operator:

wire icode:4;
icode = i10bytes[4..8];

The bits are numbered from 0 (least-significant byte) to 79 (most significant byte). i10bytes[4..8] selects bits 4, 5, 6, and 7 and returns them as a 4-bit number.

The book does not refer to i10bytes by any name, and uses pc to mean several things, including what we are using it to mean here.

Data Memory

The data memory has four inputs and one output.

Inputs:

mem_readbit: A 1-bit value. 0 means don’t read, 1 means do read. It is an error for both mem_readbit and mem_writebit to be set to 1 at the same time.
mem_writebit: A 1-bit value. 0 means don’t write, 1 means do write. It is an error for both mem_readbit and mem_writebit to be set to 1 at the same time.
mem_addr: A 64-bit value which should contain a memory address if either mem_readbit or mem_writebit is 1. It is the address at which memory is read or written.
mem_input: A 64-bit value which will be written (in little-endian) to mem_addr if and only if mem_writebit is 1.

Outputs:

mem_output: A 64-bit value read (in little-endian) from mem_addr if mem_readbit was 1; or the number 0x0000000000000000 if mem_readbit was 0.

The book refers to mem_addr as just “addr”, mem_input as “data”, and mem_output as “valM”. Note that they (confusingly) also use “valM” as the name of an input to the Register File.

Register File

The register file has six inputs and two outputs. These represent two “read ports” (called A and B to match the book’s naming) and two “write ports” (called E and M to match the book’s naming).

Read Ports:

Inputs reg_srcA and reg_srcB: 4-bit inputs containing a register number to read from.
Outputs reg_outputA and reg_outputB: 64-bit values containing the contents of the registers named in reg_srcA and reg_srcB, respectively. Thus, if reg_srcA is REG_RSP then reg_outputA will be the value stored in %rsp.
If a source was REG_NONE, the corresponding output will be the number 0x0000000000000000.

Write Ports:

Inputs reg_dstE and reg_dstM: 4-bit inputs containing a register number to write to. REG_NONE means “don’t write”.
Inputs reg_inputE and reg_inputM: 64-bit values to be stored in the registers named in reg_dstE and reg_dstM, respectively. Thus, if reg_dstE is REG_RSP then the value from reg_inputE will be the stored into %rsp.

These names are related to the names in the book as follows:

The book does not have reg_ prefixes; we added them because students were getting confused which signals were attached to what.
The book calls both inputX and outputX just “valX”; we distinguish between inputs and outputs for clarity.

Note that the book (confusingly) uses “valM” as both the name of an input to the Register File and the name of an output from the Data Memory. It also uses “valE” as both the name of an input to the Register File and the name of an output from the ALU.

Status

The status block has a single input named Stat. It should be set to one of the named constants beginning STAT_. Notably, Stat = STAT_AOK means “keep running;” any other value means “stop running” (possibly with an error).

The book also calls this Stat.

ALU, Condition Codes, and register to store the PC

The book has several components “built-in” (shown in blue in their pictures) that we’ll let you implement yourself. These include the ALU, the condition codes, and the register that stores the current program counter.

Less-common Options

Running code the hard way

If you don’t have make (e.g., because you are running in Windows), then you will need to compile things manually:

go to the tools directory

run your C compiler to make yas and yis, as e.g.

gcc -O2 yas.c isa.c yas-grammar.c -o yas
gcc -O2 yis.c isa.c               -o yis

run your D compiler to make hcl2d, as e.g.

dmd -O hcl2d.d grammar.d pegged/*.d pegged/*/*.d

return to the main directory
run hcl2d on the .hcl files, as e.g.
```
./tools/hcl2d tiny.hcl
```
This will create a file named tiny_hcl.d
run the resulting *_hcl.d file on a .yo file, as e.g.
```
dmd -run tiny_hcl.d y86/asum.yo -q
```

Shortcuts

You can omit the lower-case letter of a register bank; the lower-case version of the capital letter will be used as a default.

License and Copyright

yis, yas, and most of the provided .ys files are from

Y86 Tools (Student Distribution)
Copyright (c) 2002, 2010, 2015 R. Bryant and D. O’Hallaron, All rights reserved. May not be used, modified, or copied without permission.

Permission to distribute unmodified versions of these sources was obtained by Luther Tychonievich from the authors in July 2014 and renewed August 2015. That permission does not extend to you; you may obtain them, but not redistribute them without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders.

The provided .yo files were generated by yas from the .ys files and I believe that they fall under the same copyright and distribution rules.

hcl2d is original to this package

HCL2D version 2016-10-12
Copyright (c) 2016 Luther Tychonievich, Released into the public domain.
Attribution is appreciated but not required.

hcl2d makes use of a subset of the pegged library by Philippe Sigaud, available under the Boost license. See the README.md in the tools/pegged directory for more.

hcl2d makes use of various parts of the D standard phobos library, a collaboration of many authors available under the Boost license. See http://dlang.org/phobos/ for more.

Contents