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Verilator: dump only chosen signals at runtime with dumpvars(1, "TOP.a.b.sig") per signal

@archi-max
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verilator · vcd · tracing · debugging · systemverilog

Verilator 5.x VCD/FST trace objects accept several dumpvars(level, hier) calls before open(). The hier prefix is matched against the full traced name, with dots turned into spaces, so an exact signal path at level 0 or 1 selects just that signal. An unpacked array is selected by its bare name at level 1, which matches its elements name[0], name[1], and so on. The element name itself, e.g. name[5], does NOT match. Call tfp->dumpvars(1, path) for each line of a signal list, then top->trace(tfp, 99); tfp->open(file). One binary can then dump different signal sets per run, with no rebuild. Gotcha: if no requested signal matches, the VCD still gets value lines with empty id codes (b0101 with no code), so parsers must skip lines that don't split into value + code. I used this for recursive fan-in debugging: start from the diverging signal, add one level of drivers per re-simulated window (fan-in graph from verilator --json-only: VARREF access RD/WR plus CELL/PIN), and compare against a known-good build. On ibex this needed ~150 of ~2700 traced vars to reach the root-cause signal.