Add rebuild button in GUI

[oharboe]

Description

When iterating on a stage in ORFS flow, it would be nice to simply hit "refresh" in the GUI to rebuild the requisite stage.

Current workflow:

1. I run rm -f results/asap7/mock-array_Element/base/2_2_floorplan_io.odb && make DESIGN_CONFIG=designs/asap7/mock-array/Element/config.mk results/asap7/mock-array_Element/base/2_2_floorplan_io.odb && make DESIGN_CONFIG=designs/asap7/mock-array/Element/config.mk gui_2_2_floorplan_io.odb
2. Modify IO pin constraints
3. Rinse & repeat

Suggested Solution

Add "Rebuild" button in GUI that I can hit when having updated IO pin constraints.

I don't have the exact mechanics of this feature clear to me yet.

Additional Context

No response

[rovinski]

You could use create_toolbar_button to make your own, possibly

e.g.

create_toolbar_button -text "Run Floorplan" -script ./scripts/floorplan.tcl

I'm not sure if this pulls in the environment variables properly but I think it should.

[oharboe]

@maliberty That only works for one hardcoded case, I would like it to work for all ORFS scripts without configuration.

[maliberty]

I don't follow exactly what is requested here. Are you trying to rebuild a flow step externally and reload the result or do some change in a session and see the gui update? The later should happen automatically (we had the recent fix for ppl updating).

[maliberty]

An existing session of the openroad gui doesn't allow re-loading currently. That would be a larger request.

OR itself has no idea about ORFS steps so I think a custom button would be right. You can also create custom menus. The fastest solution is to have a button that runs the step, invokes a new gui session on the result and exits the current session.

[oharboe]

An existing session of the openroad gui doesn't allow re-loading currently. That would be a larger request.

Then, this feature request is this larger request.

OR itself has no idea about ORFS steps so I think a custom button would be right. You can also create custom menus. The fastest solution is to have a button that runs the step, invokes a new gui session on the result and exits the current session.

OR knows what script that was run initially.

So this larger request/feature idea is to add a button that:

• clears the current state in OR
• re-runs the script on the command line

This would work for several use-cases:

• floorplan.tcl, adjust CORE/DIE_AREA or CORE_UTILIZATION
• macro_place.tcl, adjust placement constraints
• io_placement_random.tcl, adjust IO constraints
• global_place.tcl, adjust placement density (a little bit more contrived example as one would want to run both global and detailed placement, possibly create a global_detail_place.tcl script that reuses global/detail_place.tcl, though I'm loath to mess around with .tcl scripts. It would be better to be able to run multiple ORFS stages in a single openroad session as a more general solution.
• cts.tsl. iterate on constraints.sdc. Note that re-running only cts.tcl would give some sort of rough preview, but non-real problem could appear and the user would need to have a strong mental model of what they are doing to know when to re-run the flow from scratch and when re-running cts.tcl is enough to give sufficient indication that the changes in constraints.sdc are moving in the right direction.