How can I debug VTA object file (vadd.o)

Questions
#1

Hi,

I want to debug VTA runtime details and check how they call API and run VTA internals.
(BTW, I already know where the driver code is, but I cannot find any examples, sequences or usages)

In my understanding, vta.build() emits a binary object (vadd.o) that has a sequence of driver API.
And it finally will be linked with a shared VTA runtime library (libvta.so) to run.
But, the generated code is binary and I cannot debug those codes.
I think there might be a proper way to see details of “vadd.o” during development.
(e.g. Decompilation of the object file, vadd.o, using llvm)

The following is some possible materials I found, but not solutions.

  1. vta.lower(..., simple_mode=False) could be a possible option,
    but it’s not available for the schedules generated from relay.build().
    I tried it but no success.

  2. vta-torture (?) code illustrates some sequence of instruction memory setup,
    but seems it’s only a part of tests and isn’t fully runnable. (Was quite helpful anyway)

At least, if you could just check whether I missed something, it’d be great.
Thank you in advance.

–OYH

#2

What is it that you want to debug exactly? (1) the generated instructions stream that VTA reads and the micro-kernels that describe dense computation?
Or (2) actually run the VTA runtime through a debugger? I haven’t done this personally but it should be doable if you run the FPGA runtime on the pynq board in GDB.

#3

For (1) you can use the following code to build your operator/model instead of the vta.build(...)

# Build GEMM VTA kernel (set debug flags)
with vta.build_config(debug_flag = 0x6):
    my_gemm = tvm.build(s, [A, B, C], "ext_dev",
                        env.target_host, name="my_gemm")
#4

Also are you looking to debug individual operators from your model? One option is to look at the autotuning tutorial that performs task extraction on a ResNet model: https://docs.tvm.ai/vta/tutorials/autotvm/tune_relay_vta.html#sphx-glr-vta-tutorials-autotvm-tune-relay-vta-py

#5

Finally, are you running this on FPGA or in a simulator (either sim or verilator-basedtsim?)

#6

Thank you for response,
Actually, I’ve been working for porting VTA to other FPGA board. (PCIe-based)
The board has on-board DRAM independent from host and it might need some surgery on memory management logic to use it.
So, before the process, I think I need toy-level C codes to understand the path of VTA execution
The word “debug” might be a bad choice for this question.

By the way, I think I found it at vta/tests/hardware/metal_test/metal_test.cc
And it seems that debug_flag is also helpful for this purpose.

  1. debug_flag. Thank you for useful information.
  2. I’m now using VTA simulator (not tsim) and also PYNQ Z1 board environment.