Programming Xilinx PowerPC

"ma" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:LcBvf.86365$ snipped-for-privacy@fe1.news.blueyonder.co.uk...

short answer: you can not long answer: you can if write your own minimal replacement fo EDK

ppc gcc can be obtained but it want help you much, see above

over JTAG or buy preloading BRAMs

use EDK or add your peripherals and re-implemented all the funtionality provide by EDK

doing it wihtout EDK costs you WAY more than than obtaining EDK, it could be done, but the time needed for that just isnt worht doing it

sorry, but Xilinx REALLY REALLY doesnt want anyone to work on the Virtex PPC without using EDK, it is doable (without EDK) but it really isnt worht trying

Antti

Thanks. Can I program it without using JTAG possibly over PCI bus? I am ready to write appropriate driver if I know where can I get the documentation for writing such driver.

Best regards

"ma" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:X0Cvf.86397$ snipped-for-privacy@fe1.news.blueyonder.co.uk...

you can "load" the program by any means you wish - as logn as you have written your own bootstrap loader. this can be of PCI bus also.

but that is not your problem, without EDK you wast WAY too much time and most likely end up with nothing anyway - there is nothing to 'program' as long as you dont have the proper system bus structure and peripheral IP cores in place, and even as it is possible to be done without using EDK, it doesnt make sense.

Antti

It depends. You have to get the code into memory somehow, either BRAM, SDRAM, FLASH, etc. that you have on your board. How you do that depends on the IO interface you have on your board, JTAG, USB, PCI, RS-232, etc.

That also depends on the IO interface you have on your board. If you have a serial-port you can print to the serial-port and get the output to a window on your PC using kermit or whatever serial program you prefer.

Petter

That make sense. My idea is that I buy EDK and then develop my driver to download and use the processor without JTAG by writing my own driver for PCI. My main aim is to learn in the cheapest way! Where can I find information about writing a driver for downloading program to PowerPC and also redirecting its STDIO to a window in PC?

Best regards and thanks for your kind help.

Thanks I think I understood what I should do to download the program into PowerPC at least in theory :) But I couldn't understand what how can use PCI bus for getting STDIO out of board? assume that I have the following code in my PowerPC program:

main() { printf("hello world\n"); }

what is the path from PowerPC to a window on PC? assuming I know how to communicate between FPGA board and PC.

Best regards

Telling you the path is the easy part. You need to (re-)implement the printf library function and instead of writing to a file (number 1 IIRC) you write the data to a memory buffer and generate an interrupt to the PCI bus. Your driver running on the PC, having received the interrupt, would read the data from the same buffer. It is no different than a network card receiving a packet from the network actually. How would you write a device driver which dumps all the packets to screen ? It's the same only the data doesn't come from the wire but from your printf implementation. You can structure your pc device driver/hardware communication stack similarly.

On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:22:51 GMT, "ma" wrote in comp.dsp:

Your program is not just programming the PowerPC core(s). The processors are hard core, but they have no connection at all to the outside world. You have to configure the FPGA to provide some internally memory, and for a program of any size, to act as a memory controller to more memory off the chip.

Virtix provides IP for all of this, and all of this must be done before the PowerPC can even fetch its first instruction.

Are they cheaper than the EDK?

Are they available through the Xilinx online store?

:) (good one)

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Please just buy the EDK. For the $500 its costs, the printf problem will be solved in about 30 minutes. The EDK its so much simple to do what you want.

If you can't afford it and are a student, you can get a free University donation to the Lab.

ma wrote:

Ok, could you point me to some documentation/tutorial for the EDK? I got an eval version with a Spartan 3 dev kit some time ago, but it was so confusing I never understood how to use it, and I couldn't find any useful beginners-guide back then.

//michael