An FPGA-based HW/SW Co-Verification Environment for Programmable Network Devices

Abstract

Bugs in network devices translate to financial losses for the service providers and degrade the quality of experience for the users. Simulation tools cannot guarantee complete fault coverage as bugs can manifest at any time in live hardware. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel hardware/software (HW/SW) co-verification tool that targets programmable dataplane network devices. The system integrates cycle-accurate software simulation with a hardware implementation. For the software simulation, open-source tools such as CocoTB and GHDL were used. The Design Under Test (DUT) and our test interfaces are embedded in programmable hardware. Data from the software can be inserted and then extracted in real-time from the input/output (I/O) ports of the DUT. To achieve this functionality the hardware design uses data insertion and extraction blocks which also support assertions. For the hardware implementation, reported experiments have been conducted on a NetFPGA-SUME platform. When a packet flows through the NetFPGA and triggers an assertion, the data present in the DUT at that time can be captured, and sent back to the simulator for further analysis and replay. Each of our design block consumes less than 1% of the available resources on the FPGA.