Lightweight resources for hardware design with GHDL

This repo started in ghdl/ghdl#111. It is meant to be a joint effort to bring together existing tools/apps/projects in order to achieve a libre framework/IDE for hardware design based on GHDL. See wiki.

The reference development platform is Debian (Buster) with GHDL, VUnit and (optional) GtkWave. This platform is available as docker images (see ghdl/docker), in order to provide seamless usage on GNU/Linux, Windows and/or macOS.

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An X11 server is required to use GUI tools inside the containers. It is highly recommended to use x11docker in order to execute containers that require GUI features on either GNU/Linux or Windows. x11docker is a helper script to enable GUI apps inside the containers by using an X server on the host. It does also have an specific security setup to enhance container isolation from host system. Besides providing several options for GNU/Linux hosts, x11docker supports multiple X servers on Windows: VcXsrv or Cygwin/X. See MSYS2, Cygwin and WSL on MS Windows.

x11docker -i [-- [-v <ABS_PATH>://srv] --] ghdl/ext:latest bash

As an alternative to using an X server on the host, a GTK+ Broadway server can be started. This is a backend for displaying GTK+ applications in a web browser. Precisely, ghdl/ext:broadway includes a script that checks if the environment variable BROADWAY is not empty, to start it on port $((8080 + $BROADWAY)). For example:

# [winpty docker run --rm -it] OR [x11docker -i] \
  -- \
  -p <HOST_PORT>:8085 -e BROADWAY=5 \
  -- ghdl/ext:broadway bash