Interpreting Breeze trace output from the EDA workflow

You can view the trace output from the Vivado synthesis run with the Breeze interface. This interface is shown in the following figure. In the Breeze I/O Summary view, the workflow duration is displayed for each of the I/O types (Good, Medium, and Bad). In this case, a lot of time is spent doing reads of 32 KB or smaller. This I/O profile is common for EDA tools that often need to access small files. This is supported by the amount of time being spent opening files, from which only a small amount of data was read or written. The table at the bottom lists the processes in order of utilization, and shows that most I/O was performed by the EDA tool itself.

Figure 2: Breeze I/O Summary view shows time spent in I/O & processes that contributed most

The Breeze Timeline view shows the full process tree showing the environment preparation performed by the scripted infrastructure and the call into the EDA tool itself. Selecting each process gives you the arguments and environment of each process, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 3: Breeze Timeline view showing the process tree and arguments of the selected process