Linux and FPGA compatibility

Was the board designed to work with Linux?

Some years ago I worked with a variety of boards on Sun workstations. Sun provided device drivers that would map memory as an I/O device so that any device could be accessed that way. A little less convenient than a dedicated device driver, but it did work. I don't know that Linux provides that, though.

-- glen

No. By backplane do you mean PCI?

You might want to try:

Which talks about writing directly to PCI memory space. This is not a particularly nice/good/proper thing to do, but it is quick and dirty and good for starters.

Alan Nishioka snipped-for-privacy@accom.com

The better FPGA board makers should include a ready to go PCI device driver. For Windows this would have been something like Numega IIRC, but for Linux I am less sure, most of my old links are long gone (thanks to MS ...).

Who is the board vendor?, check their site for driver support.

John

johnjaksonATusaDOTcom

Yeah I'm been looking all over the web and forums, can't seem to find anything useful.

Yes backplane as in the PCI bus of the Linux workstation. I will check out the article you suggested, thanks!

Xilinx is the vendor.

By the way, I have a related question....

I believe the "/proc/bus/pci/devices" file in Linux lists all the devices on the PCI bus. I'm wondering if anyone knows how this file is updated or maintained? How is this file updated with the devices.? Is it updated every time the system is turned on or does the system admin update with the appropriate information?

Thanks!

Followup to: By author: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com (Michelle) In newsgroup: comp.arch.fpga

Anything in /proc is automatically updated by the kernel.

-hpa

This is maintained by the pci driver. It's not a real file, but data wich is collected by the driver when try to read from this "file" (there is a hook function you specify in a struct which you register throu a call to proc_register). Try to look for pci_proc_attach_device in the Linux source tree:

find /usr/src/linux/ -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep pci_proc_attach_device

Writing a Linux device driver is not extremely difficult since there's a lot of documentation out there as well as source code for all (well most) of the current device drivers in use.

You can also use the "lspci" command to list all PCI devices. You can also specify a bus:slot.function number as well as verbose output and a hex dump of the PCI config space, like: "lspci -s 2:2.0 -v -x"

Petter