Troubleshooting


The user interface is unresponsive

If the user interface of Sigasi Visual HDL (SVH) is unresponsive, you can interrupt the internal compilation process by pressing the stop button in the progress view. To activate the progress view, select Window > Show View > Other… > General > Progress, or click the tiny conveyor belt icon Conveyor belt icon, on the right side of the status bar.

Create performance and memory snapshots

Performace snapshot

SVH has a built-in profiler. By default this profiler is not active. On some occasions we’ll ask you to provide an anonymized performance snapshot from the profiler. To obtain this snapshot, follow the steps below.

  • Activate the profile using Help > Sigasi > Performance > Start Async Sampling
    On Windows, use Help > Sigasi > Performance > Start Sampling instead.
  • Perform the laggy operations in SVH
  • Stop the profiler using Help > Sigasi > Performance > Stop Profiling

Memory snapshot

It may happen that, as part of a support case, we’ll ask you to provide an anonymized memory snapshot of a running Sigasi application. To obtain this snapshot, select Help > Sigasi > Performance > Capture Heap . You’ll be prompted for a location and a filename to store the memory snapshot.

Sending your snapshot to Sigasi

The snapshot you’ve obtained needs to be obfuscated to anonymize it and it needs to be uploaded. For this a snapshot_anonymizer script is provided in the SVH installation folder. You can verify the obfuscation first before sending the uploading the snapshot to us. Sigasi support  will provide instructions for uploading the snapshot.

The editor displays old contents of a file

If you edit a file outside of SVH with an external editor, SVH will normally notice the changes and ask if you want to load the changes. If it doesn’t, you can refresh the editor’s content by pressing F5 or by right-clicking a file or a project in the project explorer and selecting Refresh.

No content in the editor and only a cross in the editor tab

If you see empty views in SVH on Linux: make sure libXss or libXscrnSaver is installed.

Hover makes the editor hang for ~10s

If you experience hangs when hovering over identifiers in SVH on Linux: make sure webkit2gtk4.0 is installed.

How much local history will be stored?

SVH stores the history of your file so that you can compare your current version with the version you saved an hour ago.

You can define how much disk space is used for storing local history in Windows > Preferences, select General > Workspace > Local History.

For more information on local history, check out this page .

I see hundreds or thousands of errors

If you see a large number of errors, you either have very, very buggy code (not so likely) or your project is not configured correctly.

  1. Check that all files are mapped to the correct library.
  2. Check that all stale files are ignored. (see the section on unneeded files)
  3. Check that all third party libraries are included.
  4. Make sure that automatic build is enabled.

Auto Build is not Enabled

Symptoms:

  • When you introduce an error in a VHDL or Verilog file and save the file, an error marker shows up in the file, but not in the problems view.
  • Navigation (Find References, Open Declaration) behaves strangely when it involves more than one file.
  • Other features that involve multiple files behave incorrectly: autcomplete, refactoring, …

Cause: Project is not built automatically

Resolution: Enable automatic project builds: Project > Build Automatically

Project does not have Sigasi Support

Symptoms:

  • Files contain errors, but these errors do not show up in the Problems View
  • Cannot select a top level in the Hierarchy View
  • Cannot navigate from a name in one file to its declaration in another file
  • In the Project Explorer, the name of the library (for example: [work]) is not shown next to the filename

Cause: The project does not have Sigasi support enabled

Resolution: Enable Sigasi support: right-click the project > Configure > Add Sigasi support

Project does not have Library Mapping Information

Symptoms:

  • All files in the project are not mapped
  • The project contains only one error: “This Sigasi project can not be built since the library mapping information is missing”
  • VHDL files contain errors, but these errors do not show up in the Problems View
  • In the Project Explorer, the name of the library (for example: [work]) is not shown next to the filename

Cause: The project does not have a (valid) library mapping information file

Resolution: Reset the library mapping: right-click the project > Library Mapping > Reset Library Mapping

Project does not have Common Libraries

Symptoms:

  • Project has many errors, in practically all files. Project build may be slow.
  • The standard data types (like integer and std_logic) are not recognized.
  • The IEEE and STD libraries are not recognized.
  • The IEEE and STD files are either missing or are mapped to the wrong library (for example: [work]).

Cause: Common libraries are not configured correctly.

Resolution: Reset the common libraries: right-click the project > Library Mapping > Reset Library Mapping

SVH analyzes HDL files that I do not need

By default, SVH assumes that all VHDL or Verilog files are part of the project. However, some projects may contain multiple files with older or alternative definitions of a VHDL object. We call these stale files, because they are no longer used. In such a case you will want SVH to ignore certain files.

To exclude files (or directories) from analysis, consult the Libraries manual page.

Ignored resources are decorated with a icon in the project explorer view.

SVH startup fails: “Could not create the Java virtual machine”

On some computers, the standalone version of SVH will fail to start with an error message similar to: “Could not create the Java virtual machine.” The reason is that the Java virtual machine tries to allocate more memory than what is available. Note that we recommend a minimum of 8 GB of free memory.

In order to solve this, you can decrease the default heap size settings. You can do this by adding following lines to sigasi.ini or eclipse.ini in your SVH installation folder:

-vmargs
-Xmx1000m

This sets the maximum heap size to 1000 MB (instead of the standard 8 GB).

Note: Do not use eclipsec.exe, as this will ignore all of the settings configured in the eclipse.ini file.

SVH shows a startup message about port 4444 already being in use

If you want to run SVH on a server with multiple users, the configuration files should be updated according to the descriptions here.

I want a clean restart

If you ever suspect that the state of your project is inconsistent in SVH, you can do one or all of the following things. Consider these steps to be advanced usage; you should not need them during normal operation.

Force a clean compilation

You can force a completely clean compilation by selecting: Project > Clean … > Clean All Projects > OK.

Remove stale markers

Sometimes markers remain visible, even after the problem is fixed or when a file is excluded from compilation. We call these stale markers and they are can be caused by a crash during compilation.

You can delete these stale markers from the Problems View: In the Problems View, select the markers and press DEL (or right-click and select Delete).

Note that during the next build, the tool may generate new markers. If you want to suppress certain warnings, you can configure the linting rules.

Remove the cache

For faster performance SVH is using a cache. Sometimes the cache can get corrupted which might cause internal errors. The cache is located in your workspace. By default, SVH’s workspace is located in ${HOME}/workspaceSigasi.

To remove the cache, stop SVH and delete the folder workspaceSigasi/.metadata/.plugins/com.sigasi.hdt.shared.ui/resource.cache/sigasiBuildCache.

Remove the workspace state

Much of your configuration and cached data is stored in your workspace. By default, SVH’s workspace is located in ${HOME}/workspaceSigasi. A lot of this data is stored in the hidden .metadata directory. Sometimes, a part of your metadata can become corrupt. It can help to remove the .metadata directory (take a backup first!). This clears all of your workspace state.

  • You will need to enter your license code again.
  • You will need to import your projects again. Import > General > Existing Projects into Workspace

Keep getting reports about an “Incompatible version of Quartus”

If you are using the integration with Intel Quartus. Some people keep getting a dialog box that says something like:

Incompatible version of Quartus

Project interface was created with an older, incompatible version of Quartus. Is it OK to upgrade the project to match the installed version of Quartus?

Obviously, you should upgrade the project. If this message keeps popping up, you may want to check that SVH is using the correct version of Quartus, in the SVH application: Window > Preferences > Sigasi > External Compilers > Intel Quartus.

Contact support

If this troubleshooting guide did not solve your problem, please send us an email .

Any of the following information will help us help you:

  • Steps to reproduce your problem
  • Description of the expected behavior and the actual behavior.
  • A VETSMOD code snippet.
  • A screenshot
  • The version number of your SVH: Help > About Sigasi > Installation details Note that the version number contains the date of the release. (For example, version 2.0.1.20110809… was released on August 9, 2011.)
  • The log file: Help > Open Log