Troubleshooting

Increasing Verbosity

If things fail in the VPI/VHPI/FLI area, check your simulator’s documentation to see if it has options to increase its verbosity about what may be wrong. You can then set these options on the make command line as COMPILE_ARGS, SIM_ARGS or EXTRA_OPTS (see Build options and Environment Variables for details).

Attaching a Debugger

In order to give yourself time to attach a debugger to the simulator process before it starts to run, you can set the environment variable COCOTB_ATTACH to a pause time value in seconds. If set, Cocotb will print the process ID (PID) to attach to and wait the specified time before actually letting the simulator run.

For the GNU debugger GDB, the command is attach <process-id>.