Virtex II Pro FPGA and Linux

Virtex II Pro FPGA and Linux

[Rudolf Ladyzhenskii]

Hi, all

Did anyone tried to port ppcboot and/or Linux to those chips? (they containg
up to 4 PPC cores).

Also any links regarding Linux and those FPGAs are appreciated. I am looking
on including one of those in the new design and want to hear opinions.

Thanks,

/************************/
Rudolf Ladyzhenskii
Senior Design Engineer
SDR Communications Technologies
ph.  +61 3 8080 8215
fax. +61 3 9672 8800
Level 9, 341 Queen Street,
Melbourne, 3000
Australia
e-mail: rudolf.ladyzhenskii@sdrct.com
/***********************/


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Re: Virtex II Pro FPGA and Linux

[Peter Ryser]

Xilinx is and has been working very closely with MontaVista to port Linux to
Virtex-II Pro. The following peripherals are implemented and are available today
in the linuxppc_2_4_devel tree:
- Uart 16450/16550
- IIC
- TFT LCD display
- touchscreen
- 10/100 Mbit Ethernet
- GPIO
- Sytem ACE CF controller (booting and CompactFlash card/IBM MicroDrive access)
- PS/2 for mouse and keyboard

Please note that all these peripherals are implemented in soft logic as part of
the FPGA. PCI will be available in the next few weeks.
We have booted Linux on various boards: ML300, AFX Virtex-II Pro cards, and the
Insight 2VP4/7 boards. The ML300 with its TFT display also runs X11.

ppcboot has been ported before to Virtex-II Pro. The port was pretty straight
forward but has never been published. We are currently looking into whether it
makes sense to integrate support for the ML300 board into "The U-Boot".
For booting Virtex-II Pro based boards my favourite boot method is with System
ACE CF. That's a companion chip that configures FPGA(s), boots the software
(Linux kernel), and later on allows you to use the attached CompactFlash
card/MicroDrive as the root file system.

More infos is available from the locations below.

- Peter, Xilinx Systems Engineering

Some links:

Boards
---------
- ML300 board: http://www.xilinx.com/ml300
- AFX boards:
http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xil_prodcat_product.jsp?iLanguageID=1&iCountryID=1&title=protoboards_protoboards_page#Virtex2ProPrototype

Press Releases, Publications and Talks
------------------------------------------------
- Press release: MontaVista Linux on ML300 (16 Dec):
http://www.xilinx.com/prs_rls/silicon_vir/02184ml300.htm
- Press release: MontaVista and Xilinx (7 Jul):
http://www.xilinx.com/prs_rls/partners/02103monte_vista.htm
- Linux Journal: Embedded System a la Carte (1 Aug):
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4160697622.html
- SVLUG: Linux on Programmable Hardware (2 Oct):
http://www.svlug.org/prev/2002/Linux_on_programmable_hw.ppt (22MB!)

Other
-------
- System ACE CF: http://www.xilinx.com/isp/systemace/systemacecf.htm
- MontaVista: http://www.mvista.com



Rudolf Ladyzhenskii wrote:

> Hi, all
>
> Did anyone tried to port ppcboot and/or Linux to those chips? (they containg
> up to 4 PPC cores).
>
> Also any links regarding Linux and those FPGAs are appreciated. I am looking
> on including one of those in the new design and want to hear opinions.
>
> Thanks,
>
> /************************/
> Rudolf Ladyzhenskii
> Senior Design Engineer
> SDR Communications Technologies
> ph.  +61 3 8080 8215
> fax. +61 3 9672 8800
> Level 9, 341 Queen Street,
> Melbourne, 3000
> Australia
> e-mail: rudolf.ladyzhenskii@sdrct.com
> /***********************/
>


** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/

Re: Virtex II Pro FPGA and Linux

[Peter Vandenabeele]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 01:35:27PM +1100, Rudolf Ladyzhenskii wrote:
>
> Hi, all
>
> Did anyone tried to port ppcboot and/or Linux to those chips? (they containg
> up to 4 PPC cores).

Rudolf,

We have ported Linux to the Virtex II Pro last summer. We are currently
working to finish it on a particular standard board that holds a V2P4
(V2P with a single PowerPC 405), SRAM, SDRAM, Flash, Xilinx SDRAM
controller (soft core), Xilinx 10/100 Ethernet MAC (soft core), UART
(soft core), ... The board already boots Linux and we expect to publish
that code in a few weeks from now.

> Also any links regarding Linux and those FPGAs are appreciated. I am looking
> on including one of those in the new design and want to hear opinions.

It would be interesting to know which peripherals you require (in soft core
or hard core) to check which drivers are required. Did you start with a
certain V2P evaluation board, or still evaluating your options.

U-boot has initial support for the V2P. When we are ready with this port,
the support will be expanded for this board.

Peter

> Thanks,
>
> /************************/
> Rudolf Ladyzhenskii
> Senior Design Engineer
> SDR Communications Technologies
> ph.  +61 3 8080 8215
> fax. +61 3 9672 8800
> Level 9, 341 Queen Street,
> Melbourne, 3000
> Australia
> e-mail: rudolf.ladyzhenskii@sdrct.com
> /***********************/
>
>

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