17/07/2023: @mortbopet: Hello! 👋! Thank you for stumbling upon circt-hls. This project was mainly used as a container for work done during my thesis on a dynamically scheduled HLS flow in MLIR. Since then, the project has been generally unmaintained. The project itself has a Polygeist submodule which is tagged to the latest known-good commit, as well as a file indicating the last known good CIRCT version. I provide no guarantee for more recent CIRCT or Polygeist versions to work, but feel free to submit a PR that updates this repository to support newer versions of these dependencies.

In general, I'd recommend that you look into using CIRCT directly for your HLS projects. This repository can essentially be boiled down to a set of ad-hoc passes that i wrote to shim together things, and a driver tool to reduce the burden of manually calling things. However, it's now been so long since I've updated any of this, that I do not recommend you base your projects on this work. See it as an inspiration of how tools could be coupled together back in late 2021/early 2022, and not how things can/should work together at the time that you're reading this.

What is this? A collection of repositories and tools used to realise various end-to-end high-level synthesis (HLS) flows centering around the CIRCT project. This project can be seen as an incubator for things to go into CIRCT (... which itself is an incubator project). If you're researching CIRCT/MLIR based HLS flows, feel free to contribute or push your code to this repository - there are as of now no strict review or code requirements.

What tools do i get?

• Polygeist: A clang-based C-to-MLIR compiler front-end.
• CIRCT tools: MLIR-based hardware compiler(s) and tools
• Calyx native compiler: A rust compiler for the Calyx Hardware IR
• HSDbg: A visual debugging tool for Handshake (dataflow) circuits
• HLT: An MLIR-to-Verilator cosimulation framework
• Cosim: A dialect to support cosimulation and coverification
• hls-opt: Various HLS-related MLIR passes, mostly to support the above tools.

These are the (intended) end-to-end flows that can be driven from this directory:

• C
  • Polygeist
    • CIRCT
      • Staticlogic Dialect (statically scheduled HLS)
        • Calyx Dialect
          • Calyx native compiler (not a component of CIRCT)
            • SystemVerilog
      • Handshake Dialect (dynamically scheduled HLS)
        • FIRRTL Dialect
          • HW Dialect
            • SystemVerilog
            • HLS Cosimulation
  • Vivado ("Classical" HLS)
    • SystemVerilog

Since things are changing rapidly, the most reliable method of setting this up and getting things to work is to replicate the steps done in CI (minus the caching steps).

If you don't already have a CIRCT/MLIR build locally, checkout https://github.com/llvm/circt and go follow the instructions. We do not include a CIRCT submodule in circt-hls since we assume that most people interested in this project will already be looking into CIRCT.

CIRCT-HLS was successfully compiled (and mostly successfully tested) with CIRCT version 062eab31a67c8a8418b2ba9fb4f1814cdca08783. The test failure case: cosim :: suites/Dynamatic/insertion_sort/tst_insertion_sort.c

The script build.sh (tested under Ubuntu 22.04.1) may also provide a reference point for building the tool chain.

Polygeist is used as the primary front-end for ingesting high-level programs. While it is possible to build Polygeist with an external LLVM/MLIR build, it often occurs that the CIRCT and Polygeist LLVM versions have API-breaking differences. It is suggested that you try building Polygeist with an external LLVM build (reusing your CIRCT build), and as a fallback use the internal LLVM submodule of Polygeist, which is sure to work. Information on how to build Polygeist is available in the Polygeist repository.

Some tooling relies on certain Python packages, which can be installed using requirements.txt:

pip install -r requirements.txt

This repository contains an LLVM tool called circt-hls which provides various passes used to realize the HLS flows. This is the primary place for incubating things which are intended to be eventually merged into CIRCT.

To build the tool:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -G Ninja .. \
    -DCIRCT_DIR=$PWD/../circt/build/lib/cmake/circt \
    -DMLIR_DIR=$PWD/../circt/llvm/build/lib/cmake/mlir \
    -DLLVM_DIR=$PWD/../circt/llvm/build/lib/cmake/llvm \
    -DLLVM_ENABLE_ASSERTIONS=ON \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG \
    -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON
$ ninja
$ ninja check-circt-hls
$ ninja check-circt-hls-integration
$ ninja check-circt-hls-cosim

(Modify the above wrt. where you built circt/mlir/llvm).

CIRCT-HLS is driven using the hlstool, available in the build/bin path where you built CIRCT-HLS. A guide to using hlstool is available here.

A good starting point for getting familiar with the flow is to execute the cosimulation test suite (see below). These tests will emit all of the IR that was generated during lowering, which can be manually inspected. From here, we encourage you to write your own kernels! For inspiration on how to drive the tool, the best reference is to replicate the commands in the cosimulation test suite (the // RUN: line can be executed manually, substituting the %s argument with the path of the source file).

• integration tests can be run by executing the ninja check-circt-hls-integration command in the circt-hls/build directory. This will execute the lit integration test suites.
• Cosimulation verification can be run by executing the ninja check-circt-hls-cosim command in the circt-hls/build directory. This will execute the lit extended integration test suite, HLS'ing all of the C tests in the cosim_test directory. Each file is progressively lowered and the intermediate representations for each file during the lowering process will be available in build/cosim_test/suites/Dynamatic/.... This can be very helpful if you're developing and want to inspect (or use) some of the intermediate results generated during compilation.