Introduction

Almost a year ago I received a parcel by post from US. When I opened the parcel I found this box.




The ZedBoard was a present from someone involved in promoting the new Zynq device from Xilinx, but with no strings attached. At that time I was busy working as an ASIC designer and had no time to play with the board. It wasn't until December in 2013 that I had a chance to unpack the box and power-up the ZedBoard.

At that time I got an email from Per and Andreas at  Silica (Avnet) here in Stockholm, where they offered a one day hands-on training class on the Zynq-7000 using the ZedBoard, part of the "Xilinx Speedway Design Workshops". Here is what this workshop covered:

Introduction to the Zynq-7000 in Vivado AP SoC

"This class demonstrates the techniques and tools used to create a basic Zynq-7000 AP SoC design. Through a series of instructor presentations and hands-on labs, hardware and firmware developers will learn the required steps for creating a complete Zynq-7000 AP SoC design on ZedBoard. The Zynq-7000 AP SoC architecture is explained, including the ARM® Cortex™-A9 processing system (PS) and the 7 series programmable logic (PL). The course also details the individual components that comprise the PS such as I/O peripherals, clocking, interrupt, AXI interfaces and memory controllers. Emphasis will be placed on efficient PL-to-PS interfacing including processing interrupts generated from a PL peripheral. To complete the design flow, the critical steps of hardware and software debugging techniques will be shown".

This training session was the head start I needed. I went home and started to play with my ZedBoard. At the same time a decided to write this blog and here we are. All of you who have read my "FPGA design from scratch" blog will feel at home. I will follow the same idea and describe the whole design flow in an easy to understand fashion.

Blog entries should be read from 1 onwards in numerical order to get the full story. At the end of every blog entry there are three links called:   Top   Previous  Next

• Top takes us to the top of the current blog entry.
• Previous takes us to the previous entry
• Next takes us to the next entry 

Table of content

In the left sidebar there is a clickable TOC where you can access all blog entries:

There are several forums discussing FPGA design. The Xilinx forum is one of them. The Avnet forum and ZedBoard forum are two others.

Wiki

The goal of the Xilinx Wiki site is to provide technical information and collaborate with the community on Open Source projects that are being done in Xilinx. Xilinx also provides a Git repository to help with open source development and collaboration, and all sources can be downloaded from the GIT repository

1. Select a computer to use. In my case a MacBook Air
   
2. Setup a virtual machine using VirtualBox.
3. Install Ubuntu Linux 13.10 64bit in the virtual machine
4. Install Xilinx Vivado Design Suite (the Linux version)
5. Use the Vivado software to generate a configuration bitstream
6. Use Vivado SDK to write a simple program
7. Connect the ZedBoard to the computer
   
8. Configure the Zynq FPGA part and load the program
9. Run the program that will light up some LEDs on the board

Just one last thing

We are going to have fun.

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Using the pre-built image

We start by putting the pre-built image on the SD card and boot PetaLinux.



We use the petalinux-package command to generate a BOOT.bin file containing the first-stage bootloader, U-Boot and the bitstream.

-->petalinux-package --boot --fsbl .../zynq_fsbl --fpga .../download.bit --uboot





Copy files to SD card

Copy the BOOT.BIN and the image.ub files to the SD card in this order.

Power on the ZedBoard

Insert the SD card in the card slot, connect a terminal and power on the board. The boot process will start and we see the U-boot prompt. Then press any key to stop U-boot.  The default boot command in U-boot tries to boot from the system memory. We must change it to boot from the SD card instead. Here is the command to do that:

U-Boot-PetaLinux> setenv bootcmd 'run sdboot'; saveenv



Then type reset to restart the boot process. 

This time the system will boot and show the login prompt.




New board bringup

We follow the Petalinux Board Bringup Guide to create the new PetaLinux BSP. Normally there are three stages to the board bringup process:

1. Create and/or configure a hardware platform ready for PetaLinux.
2. Export the hardware platform configuration settings into the new software platform and complete any further software platform configuration steps.
3. Build the first stage bootloader (FSBL), U-Boot and the linux image.

Create a new PetaLinux platform

The first step is to create a new PetaLinux SDK software platform, ready for building a Linux system customized to our hardware platform. The petalinux-create command is used to achieve this:

-> petalinux-create --type project --template <CPU_TYPE> --name <PROJECT_NAME>

CPU_TYPE      (zynq or microblaze)
PROJECT_NAME  (the name of the platform we are building)

Here is the result.




Fixing software bugs

Before we can continue, we have to fix two software bugs in the PetaLinux design flow.

1. Use an earlier version of grep (2.6.3)
2. Add update-rc.d to the Petalinux bin directory

Here is a solution for the first problem found in the Xilinx forum.

Here is a solution for the second problem I found in the Xilinx forum.

Now we are ready to continue the board bringup task.

Import hardware description

1. Go to the directory which contains the hardware description (system_wrapper.hdf) generated from Vivado (LED_Controller.sdk).

-->cd ..../LED_Dimmer/LED_Controller.sdk

2. Import the hardware description with the command: petalinux-config --get-hw-description -p <plnx-proj-root>

The -p option points to the PetaLinux project (PetaZed) that will be updated to match the hardware platform configuration.




It launches the top system configuration menu when the command is used the first time or the tool detects there is a change in the system configuration.





3. We will exit without making any changes.

Build system image

1. Change into the directory of our PetaLinux project (PetaZed).

2. Run petalinux-build to build the system image

-->petalinux-build





3. When the build has finished the following files have been written to the images/linux directory.




4. Follow the description in the beginning of this blog entry to put the image on an SD card and boot PetaLinux on the ZedBoard.





Summary

Fixing software bugs slows down the development speed.

• Ubuntu 14.04
• Vivado 2104.2
• Xilinx SDK 2104.2
• Petalinux 2014.2

I will start by rerunning part 23 (Booting Petalinux) to see if things still work. Here is the Petalinux BSP for the ZedBoard.

We will start by loading and booting the pre-built Petalinux image.

--> source /opt/PetaLinux/petalinux-2014.2-final/settings.sh
--> cd ...../Avnet-Digilent-ZedBoard-2014.2
--> petalinux-boot --jtag --prebuilt 3

The FPGA is configured and the image file is downloaded, but the system is not booting. Here is the display on the terminal screen.

After a few seconds the booting starts and the following is displayed on the terminal screen.

Rebuilding the Petalinux kernel image

Now let's see if we can rebuild the kernel image and boot it on our ZedBoard. We will follow part 25 and repeat all steps. We first run the petalinux-build command to compile the software image.

-> cd <Project Dir>/Avnet-Digilent-ZedBoard-2014.2
-> source /opt/PetaLinux/petalinux-v2014.2-final/settings.sh
-> petalinux-build

The build fails showing this error messages. It seems we are missing the file predefs.h in Ubuntu 14.04. A quick fix is to copy the file /usr/include/stdc-predef.h to the directory /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/bits and rename it to predefs.h.This fix may need some more investigation, but for now it works.

Now the build finishes without any errors.

Make a prebuilt package

We will use the command petalinux-package to packages all files into a prebuilt package and then use the command: petalinix-boot --jtag --prebuilt 3 to boot the ZedBoard. See part 25 for more information. After we have made the package we can follow the instructions from the first part of this blog.

->petalinux-package --prebuilt --fpga download.bit

Summary

Upgrading to new software is never a painless experience but with the help from the community there is almost always a solution to be found. Thanks Martin for helping out and a message to Xilinx to fix the bug.

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Let's click the Upgrade button and see what happens.





When we hit the Upgrade button the installation starts by fetching all the files from the Ubuntu download server.





The the download has finished the following window appears.





Clicking the Start Upgrade button will start the installation which will take 2-3 hours. When finished we have to restart the system.





We are running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

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I wanted to convert my LED_Controller design to run in Vivado 2014.2 but ran into problems when trying to synthesis the design. Vivado 2014.2 crashed giving no clue what was the problem, so I decided to start from scratch and build my design once more. I will follow the same procedure as last time (Lab1) and only document the changes that have been made to the design flow. Let's get started again.

--> vivado &




We will create a new project. Here is the result.




This window will appear when starting the Run Block Automation process.

Here is what the design should look like.



Build and export to SDK

Follow the instructions in part 11 to build the hardware. To export to SDK select from the File menu->Export->Export Hardware





Click OK. Only one file called system_wrapper.hdf will be exported.





Starting SDK


From the Vivado File menu select: Launch SDK.










When starting SDK from Vivado, the file system_wrapper.hdf will be read automatically and the system_wrapper_hw_platform will be generated. Here is the result.





Create a software application

Follow part 12 to create a Hello World software application. When starting SDK from the terminal select the following workspace.





Running lab2

I was able to repeat lab2 without any problems following the instruction in the earlier blog entries.

Summary

Vivado 2014.2 has streamlined a few things but hasn't introduced any major changes.

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Xilinx has released new versions of Vivado and PetaLinux. Let's download and install the new releases and use them in a new project.

Download and install Vivado 2014.2

This time we will use the Web Install Client, a small program that can be downloaded from the Xilinx download page. Here is a video you can watch to learn more about the new download program.





Click the "Linux 64-bit Web Install Client" link.





Click Save File. The file will be downloaded to the Download directory if we haven't specified another directory. Make the file executable and and run it using sudo.





This will start the Xilinx Vivado installer.





Enter User ID and Password and click Next.





Accept the license agreements.





Select what to download.





Customize the installation by adding thing we need and remove things we don't need.





Look at the download size. Only 2.59 GB. Select destination directory.





See part 45 for the rest of the installation.

Installing Petalinux

We will follow the description in part 22 and install Petalinux 2014.2.








Download Board Support Package





Running the installer

• lib32gomp1
• lib32ncursesw5

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