ska-sa / alveo_flash_images

Vivado projects that are used as the board support packages for the Alveo board

Alveo Board Support Packages

Purpose

This repository contains the scripts to generate the vivado design that is used to compile the board support firmware. The bitstream generated from this project is loaded on to the cards flash memory.

This design also serves as the infrastructure into which Matlab/Simulink toolflow designs are connected.

Vivado Setup

Please ensure that you have at Vivado 2021.1 installed and the correct board files for your hardware, otherwise the project generation will fail. You will need to sign up with Xilinx for access to the Alveo Vivado files before being able to download them.

Board	Version
AU50	board files v1.3
AU280	board files v1.1

Alveo board files

Project and Bitfile Generation

Clone this repo and change into the directory of the card you'd like to target eg au50_bsp

git clone https://github.com/ska-sa/alveo_bsp.git
cd alveo_bsp/au50_bsp

Source the settings64.sh script in your Vivado install directory (edit the following command):

source /<xilinx install directory>/Vivado/2021.1/settings64.sh

Start vivado:

vivado

In the tcl command-line run:

source au50_bsp.tcl

Alternatively you can generate the project and bitfiles from the command-line with the following command:

vivado -mode batch -source au50_bsp.tcl

This will output a bitfile and an MCS flash image file. The bitstream can be programmed to the SDRAM via JTAG and tested if required. The MCS file is the one required to program the flash.

Flash Programming

The programming of the flash requires a JTAG programmer, please refer to the Alveo documentation for the guide to setting this hardware up.

If you have multiple Alveos and JTAG programmers in the host machine, you will need to update the programming tcl script to point to the correct card and programmer. You can get your Alveos name and the JTAG serial number via the hardware manager by opening the target device. The AU50s are named xcu50_u55n_0, xcu50_u55n_0_1, xcu50_u55n_0_2 etc. Use these to configure the programming tcl file.

Start Vivado ensuring that the au50_bsp.mcs file is in the directory vivado is started from and au50_program.tcl in accessable from where you are running the Vivado Hardware Manager.

In the Vivado tcl command-line run:

source au50_program.tcl

This will take a few minutes to erase and prgram the flash. Once done the host machine will require a cold reboot to ensure the PCIe bus is powered down and the new flash image is loaded on bootup.

Once rebooted run:

lspci -d 10ee: -vvv -D

to check that the card had booted with the new flash image.

Registers can be read to determine the version of the image. ToDo: update readme with these registers and values.

Misc Notes (ToDo: put these in some sort of structure)

The flash on the AU50 consists of a golden image at 0x0 and the flash images from 0x01002000. When the mcs file is uploaded it will need to be at this address. The golden image is write protected and is fallen back to if the flash image fails to load.

The flash image needs to be small enough to load in the time that the PCIe spec requires, so that the host can enumerate the card on the PCIe bus. Images that are too large can cause the card not to enumerate.

The max size of the BAR is dependant on the host machine, this current

PCIe is not designed to be hot swapable, the size of the BAR is determined on host startup. This means that the memory space allocated at startup is the max memory that can be accessed by any subsiquent firmware uploaded.