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Question on Xilinx VirtexPro II FPGA chip... please

I'd appreciate if someone could answer a few questions below: If you reply by email, REMOVE "SPAMNOMORE" in capital letters repeated in my address twice (edit address manually)!!

We ordered "Xilinx Virtex-Pro II" development kit, your answers will NOT change buying decisions - it?s already here, we need to know:

  1. Is it possible to put either Linux or Nucleus RTOS into this chip memory, to my knowledge your chip includes two PowerPC's and we intend to use it as a host? Note we need to know if either OS can be loaded, not both, we will experiment with Linux and then Nucleus RTOS (Nucleus RTOS is Realtime Operating System from AcceleratedTechnology/MentorGraphics Corporation, for Xilinx FPGA's embedded design).

  1. If yes, when Linux or Nucleus RTOS is loaded, will we get communications stack and drivers for IEEE 802.11 in ad-hoc mode (this as any EE Engineer knows is a wireless LAN standard)?

  2. If yes, then we'll purchase a standard IEEE 802.11 card, can this card be plugged into your development kit port? From what I gathered from my professor, he intends to plug this card into your "serial port", but seems strange to me.

  1. Maybe you can suggest additional Xilinx products to use in our IEEE

802.11 wireless communications project (ad-hoc mode)?

VirtexPro II development kit is already here and I was asked to research the above information to start design.

Thanks for your time.

Reply to
Mark Levitski
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Which development kit exactly? There are quite a bit of them:

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Into the _FPGA_ chip memory--no, I don't think it has enough memory (just a few hundred of kilobytes). But the development board likely has some memory that can be used from the FPGA, typically 64 or 128 megabytes, and this is sufficient for running Linux of the PowerPC.

I don't have the hardware yet (planning to get it), but I know that there are Linux distributions that run on the FPGA, for example TimeSys Linux which should run on Amirix development boards out of the box.

I don't know how much work would it be to port the Linux to run on some other development kit, but in theory it is possible.

On Nucleus RTOS I know nothing of, sorry.

I was told (on this list, IIRC) that the Xilinx EDK comes with a minimal realtime kernel that also runs on the FPGA.

Of the rest of your questions I know little about, sorry.

Reply to
Tuukka Toivonen

It would really help to know ... ;-)

If he got the xc2vp100, probably ...

The support for the VirtexIIPro is in the CVS (AFAIK), so why do you need a special distribution ?

To get Linux booting (kernel and console I/O) shouldn't be more than very few days. The big part is to get the drivers right for the "weird" devices you probably have on the board ..

cheers

Reply to
E.S.

Which CVS? Do you mean latest Linux kernel 2.6.8.1? Grepping around the source, I find some interesting defines in arch/ppc/boot/simple/rw4. Can you provide any pointers for documentation about running standard Linux on Virtex-II Pros?

Very interesting.

Reply to
Tuukka Toivonen

Yes and yes by using the on-board DDR memory. The ML310 board actually ships with a pretty extensive demo for Linux. The web page for ML310 at

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has a documentation section that describes in much detail on how to build Linux systems for the board. Further, XAPP765 is a document to get you started with EDK and MontaVista Linux
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A (very) minimal Linux kernel takes around 600KB. So, you might be able to run it out of BRAM on larger chips. However, in most cases it is not the Linux kernel that takes most space but the application that you run on top of it.

Nucleus is known to run on Virtex-II Pro. For more information please contact Mentor.

While we have not tested the ML310 with a wireless card the Linux kernel supports these cards and we have done tests with PCMCIA cards from Cisco on the ML300 board. So, chances are high that a 802.11 PCI card will work out of the box.

Yes, into one of the four PCI slots (2x 3.3V, 2x 5V).

- Peter

Reply to
Peter Ryser

Quick message for those asking part numbers (if you didnt ask - IGNORE, thanks for answers):

XILINX VirtexProII-based ML300 and ML310 boards (we have both), part# as follows: a) UW-V2P-ML310 - US version, embedded/development platform? It may be 'HW" in front of this part# and not "UW" and b) DO-V2P-ML300 - US version, evaluation/development kit (EDK 6.2I)

*****Your original message******** It would help, if you would tell us, which board you got ...
Reply to
Mark Levitski

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