We have provided a Docker image that has all the tools we will be using pre-installed. If you are unfamilar with Docker/containers, there are many online tutorials available (e.g. here). Essentially Docker provides a lightweight “virtual” environment, permitting you to run different architectures/operating systems and libraries/platform environments on a machine. You will need to install Docker on your system.
The standard Dockerfile we will use is the following. Please feel free to customize as you see fit!
FROM rajitmanohar/act_sky130:latest USER root RUN apt-get update RUN apt-get -y install tightvncserver ssh vim emacs blackbox gnuplot xterm RUN echo root:rootpass | chpasswd && echo user:userpass | chpasswd USER root CMD service ssh start ; while true ; do sleep 3600; done;
This configuration does the following:
rajitmanohar/act_sky130:latest. Note that the base operating system is Linux (Ubuntu). It is a multi-platform build with binaries for both arm64 and amd64 architectures.user account user to userpass, and the root password to rootpass. You can use these later to login and install other packages if needed.Feel free to customize this to install any software/tools/etc. you might want.
To build an image using the Dockerfile above (saved as Dockerfile in your working directory), run:
$ docker build -t async - < Dockerfile
This will use the Dockerfile to build an image named async.
There are many ways to start docker containers. A simple setup that we use is to have a shared directory between the container and the host machine where you are running docker, and forward port 7500 from the host machine to the ssh port (22) in the container. The following command will accomplish this.
$ docker run -d -p 7500:22 -v /path/to/directory:/share async
The /share directory in the container will correspond to the specified path on the host.
Note: a container is like a running machine; if you stop the container using docker, that is the same as powering off a machine. Docker allows you to pause a container, which is useful if you want to leave the machine “in suspension” so that it stops using CPU resources on your system.
At this point, you can connect to the container using the ssh command
$ ssh -p 7500 user@localhost
To connect to a graphical environment in the container, we can use the VNC remote desktop system (e.g. TightVNC). Once you've logged in to the container, run:
$ vncserver
and follow the prompts to setup a password. This will start the vnc server within the container. The vnc server will report a display (usually :1), and the network port it listens to is 5900 plus the display number.
To connect to the running graphical environment within the container, use ssh to connect the container as follows:
$ ssh -p 7500 -L 8500:localhost:5901 user@localhost
Now the local port 8500 on the host will correspond to the VNC port 5901 in the container. You can now connect to port 8500 on your local machine using a VNC client to get a graphical desktop that is running on the container. If the vnc server in the container has a different display number (e.g. :3 instead of :1), then 8500 should be forwarded to a different port number (e.g. 5903 for display :3, rather than 5901 for display :1).
Note that once the container is setup, you don't need to re-do those steps. You can simply pause the container to stop it, and resume it when you want to re-connect to it via ssh.
The container is not updated as frequently as the git repositories. To update the tools from within the container, use the following steps, running as root:
$ cd /home/cad/actflow $ git pull $ git submodule update --init --recursive $ export ACT_HOME=/usr/local/cad $ ./build
The git repository for the actflow repository is checked out in /home/cad/actflow. The steps outlined above pull the latest code and build and install the tools into /usr/local/cad (the default location in the container).