FPGA Emulation Software That Operates On Networks

Simulate your FPGA SmartNIC designs on a network testbed without buying a FPGA!

Requirements

• CMake 3.16 or higher
• Verilator
• DPDK (tested on 21.11 LTS)

Building

Make sure that Verilator and DPDK builds include their PkgConfig data before starting.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make

This should generate a festoon binary that can be run. Syntax for the application can be shown with festoon --help. While testing, I ran it with the following command:

festoon -l 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16 -- -p 0x1 -P --config '(0,0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16)'

Adding custom designs

HDL design for Festoon is done completely within the verilog directory. By default, the directory contains a simple crossbar design that pushes Ethernet RX to PCI RX, and PCI TX to Ethernet TX. This can be easily modified as long as the top module inputs and outputs remains the same, though. All communication with the DPDK wrapper is done with a modified XGMII with 8 control bits and 64 data bits instead of 4 and 32 respectively. By default, the CMakeLists.txt in the directory will automatically include any Verilog files added into the top-level verilog directory, but subdirectories will need to be added manually. See the verilog directory for more details.

This project is part of Haoda Wang's undergraduate thesis project