Hello everyone,
First of all, big thanks to everyone who contribute to this newsgroup. Most of the time, I can find a solution to my problem just googling this newsgroup. Not this time however...
I know that this is a long post but if you can help with the UltraController II + SystemAce or UC2 + xmd, please read on.
I'm currently trying to get a system with the UltraController II up and running. To make a long story short (hopefully), I started with the tools at v7.1, the UC2 reference design, and an eval board from Avnet. I was able to successfully build a small system using the UC2 and a Wishbone bus. I always ran the UC2 code using the debugger however (XMD
- GDB).
Confident that the UC2 was a good solution for me (as I don't have external ram), I spent a few months incorporating the UC2 in my real design (3 FPGAs, two VP40 and one VP7). I used SystemC to simulate the UC2 and now I reached the point of trying it out in hardware. That's when the problems start...
First of all, xmd can't even detect the PowerPCs in the JTAG chain in the big design. So I took a step back and went back to the Avnet eval board to play around more and get to understand the flow better. Right now I'd like to accomplish two things:
1- I'd like to be able to create a SystemAce file that loads both the bit config file and the elf program file at boot-up (for the Avnet board with a single VP7). 2- I'd like to understand how xmd can load and run my software without the GDB debugger.For the SystemAce, I used the modified genace.tcl script that comes with the reference design but it doesn't work. To be more precise, I can generate the ace file, the SystemAce loads everything in the FPGA fine (done led goes up), but my code doesn't boot. The hardware part seems okay because one of my debug led turns on (attached directly to VCC in the fpga). Since the code doesn't boot, I tried to use xmd to connect to the PowerPC. However, xmd doesn't detect the PowerPC (ERROR: Unable to connect to PowerPC target. Invalid Processor Version No
0x00000000"). That's strange because if I then proceed to load the bit file using iMPACT, then xmd can detect the PowerPC fine.Now for xmd, I'd like know how to load and run my code with it. I followed the instructions in XAPP571 (to properly use the DEBUGHALT controller), but it doesn't work. I tried a few things but I'm really in the dark as I don't have deep understanding of the whole EDK flow (which is why I choose the UltraController in the first place).
I appologize for the long post but I wanted to give as much details as possible to whoever could help me... By the way, I opened several webcases with Xilinx to help me along the way to where I am now, but I thought I'd give this newsgroup a shot for any UC2 experts out there.
Thanks.
Patrick Dubois