Propagate the update of bd.tcl from a IP design/package to the used IP issue ?

[s-meunier]

Hi,

On a user customized IP I've got a problem about propagation of changes of the bd.tcl. When I updated the init{} or propagate{} proc in my IP there were no change in my design using this IP.  Yes I update the IP catalog and upgrade the IP. All other changes were committed (parameters, net, interface,...) but not the bd.tcl content .I removed it or put BIG syntaxe error and there was no complaints. validate_bd_design wasn't affected.

After some while I saw that content of bd.tcl was "included" in a namespace with the IP name and there was indeed no change inside. The content was the initial value of my bd.tcl.

Finally I discovered that I have to stop and restart Vivado to get the new bd.tcl content included in the namespace. Closing and reopen project without restarting Vivado have no effect.

Is there a "cleaner" way to propagate bd.tcl changes ? Is the job of upgrade tcl and in this case how ?

I'm in V2017.3

Thanks

[howardp · Accepted solution]

I contacted a developer in the IP services group and he said that the bd.tcl files are intentionally not read back in again due to a decision they made dealing with efficiency optimization.

Therefore in his opinion, closing and re-opening Vivado was the correct solution.

[s-meunier]

Ok howardp I understand the idea.
May be it would be appreciable to have a notice in the IP development manual (or elsewhere) to inform user of this special procedure that is not coherent with the other steps of IP development where all is very assisted and easy (tanks for the job). As all is simple and work fluently we blame our code and we don't think about an exception in the process. I lost about 2 or 3 days to understand what's happen.
Best regards

[howardp]

I've made a request to add a note about this to the documentation.

[lundsvhdl]

For debugging purposes, it may be convenient to know that procedure hooks in bd.tcl are loaded in namespace with name of the IP.

E.g. 

::be.local_user_axi_SomeThing_2.0::post_propagate

One can redefine this procedure without restarting Vivado.