Working with Xilinx FPGAs on FreeBSD

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Wojciech A. Koszek
wkoszek@FreeBSD.org
http://FreeBSD.czest.pl/~wkoszek/

This page documents steps necessary to get Xilinx ISE 11.1 IDE running on FreeBSD 9 system. Please contact the author if information found here didn't let you to get Xilinx FPGA toolkit working, are inappropriate or obsolete.

ISE WebPack is a free variant of ISE Design Suite supporting most popular FPGA chips manufactured by Xilinx. This version should be enough for you in most of the cases and its use will be documented here.

Short theory behind the ISE and FreeBSD relationship – Xilinx delivers ISE binaries compiled for Linux machines. In FreeBSD, we're able to get Linux binaries to work with a help of so called Linuxolator – Linux emulation layer present in the kernel and within the base system.

Below, I present steps necessary to get your system prepared to execute Linux binaries. Later, I show how to unpack, run and install ISE environment step by step. I outline tasks necessary to get FPGAs programmed. At the end, procedure of running couple of ISE tools is documented.

Linux emulation layer can either be enabled permanently in your kernel configuration file, or be enabled by loading linux.ko kernel module:

# kldload linux.ko

Typical solution is to enable it through /boot/loader.conf, to make it work just after system startup:

linux_load="YES"

You can verify whether the module has been properly loaded by inspecting kldstat output:

# kldstat | grep linux
 2    2 0xc0aa1000 2e988    linux.ko

ISE installation tools require an access to the emulated Linux process file system. You can mount it with a command:

mount -t linprocfs linprocfs /compat/linux/proc

You can verify whether the file system got properly mounted by inspecting mount output:

# mount | grep linprocfs
linprocfs on /compat/linux/proc (linprocfs, local)

Kernel-related part of Linux emulation enabling procedure should be finished now. We still have to install Linux libraries necessary by xsetup, installation program.

This tutorial is being written with new, fresh FreeBSD 9-CURRENT system running next to me. Apart from X11 and ViM, nothing has been installed. Installer and command-line utilities as well as “ise” – graphical frontend require couple of packages installed:

%ls /var/db/pkg/ | grep linux
drwxr-xr-x    2 root  wheel   512 Jan  9 15:48 linux-f10-expat-2.0.1
drwxr-xr-x    2 root  wheel   512 Jan  9 15:48 linux-f10-fontconfig-2.6.0
drwxr-xr-x    2 root  wheel   512 Jan 12 02:09 linux-f10-png-1.2.37
drwxr-xr-x    2 root  wheel   512 Jan  9 15:48 linux-f10-xorg-libs-7.4_1
drwxr-xr-x    2 root  wheel   512 Jan  9 15:47 linux_base-f10-10_2

You can see full list of packages installed at a time of writing this tutorial here (while most of ports has been installed as a part of ImageMagic installation, so that obtaining screenshots could be possible):

ports_for_xilinx_ise.txt]

Moreover, you are supposed to create dynamic link to /compat/linux/opt in your main root directory:

# ln -s /compat/linux/opt /opt

This will prevent you from running into “not enough disk space warning”.

Basically, this is the end of Linuxolator preparation. Now, we're going to start installation.

In order to obtain Xilinx ISE WebPack, you must visit this site:

http://www.xilinx.com/tools/webpack.htm

In order to proceed, one needs to have an account on the Xilinx page. After successful account creation, you have to log in and download WebPack package. Successful process should result in having .tar file on your disk:

wkoszek@laptop:/media/Multimedia$ ls Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD.tar
-rw-r--r--  1 wkoszek  wkoszek  2868316160  5 paź 17:04 Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD.tar

There were numerous of reports about inability to install Xilinx ISE 11.1 on multiple systems, including Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux. While writing this tutorial, several problems appeared as well. Most problems come from inappropriate archive file, which may get destroyed due to connection interruption. This is checksum of the correct file:

# md5 /home/wkoszek/Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD.tar 
MD5 (/home/wkoszek/Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD.tar) = 42ce70bd3f78e68295175db2441c8b3a
# sha1 /home/wkoszek/Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD.tar
SHA1 (/home/wkoszek/Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD.tar) =2b57b4fb00914e50d1b0a4d0a49e511ca56e85fb

While you're logged in your profile on Xilinx page, you need to point a mouse pointer to “File size” section in Download manager – small window will show up and checksum will be presented

Most of the problems come from the lack of checksum verification. Remember about it, since it can save you a lot of time.

Unpack the archive and change the directory:

# tar xf Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD.tar
# cd Xilinx_11.1_WebPack_SFD

Apart from xsetup, nice xinfo program is available for verifying, that we can actually start X11 program in emulation, and we can observe how our configuration actually look like:

# ./bin/lin/xinfo

Here's the exported information about my reference system: xinfo_ref9.txt]

Having system and libraries prepared should let us to get the installer running:

# ./bin/lin/xsetup

{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_1_welcome.jpg}}	{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_2_agreement2.jpg}}
{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_3_agreement2.jpg}}	{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_4_directory_selection.jpg}}
{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_5_products_selection.jpg}}	{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_6_install_options.jpg}}
{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_7_install_options2.jpg}}	{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_8_summary.jpg}}
{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_9_license.jpg}}	{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_10_license2.jpg}}
{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_11_update.jpg}}	As a result, you should have following message displayed at the end. {{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_12_success.jpg}}

And basically, ISE installation should be ready.

On reference system..: {{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_13_ise.jpg}}

In order to let you to work with Xilinx command line tools, you can use preprepared shell scripts settings32.csh (for CSH) and settings32.sh (for sh-alike shells) living in /compat/linux/opt/Xilinx/11.1. I've put:

source /compat/linux/opt/Xilinx/11.1/settings32.csh

Into my ~/.cshrc script.

Once you have software tools working it would be quite nice to see that you can actually upload something to your FPGA board and have a proof that it actually works.

Due to the popularity of the FPGA development boards we can distinguish two cases here:

A. You're Xilinx Spartan 3e Starter Kit (S3ESK) user

B. You're other FPGA board user

B isn't documented here (yet), because author doesn't have any bigger standalone FPGA board (yet)

Option A is quite comfortable, since this board is really popular and a lot of people has been dealing with it in UNIXish systems. You just take a bitstream targeted against Spartan 3e500 (fg320 variant) and you stream it through the programming application, that deals with USB communication.

Option B will be documented in the future

Xilinx based its programming functionality on FX2 chip (also known as EZ-USB), nowadays made by Cypress. This chip is a 8051 microcontroller with USB support. It supports reenumeration – processor implements special kind of protocol that lets a user to submit '51 machine code which is being used to to program microcontroller. Once done, it detaches from the USB bus and attaches back as a different, 'target' device. Together with modularity, some problems exist. You have to have a software dealing with reenumeration..

Even though BSD native tools existed (misc/eztools), they didn't survive “New USB” convertion. However, there exists fxload for Windows that deploys libusb: http://wiki.epfl.ch/cfavi/fxload-libusb. It can be trivially changed and compiled without problems on FreeBSD. commit to ports/…

Once you have fxload working, you have to reprogram the chip to serve a correct function. It can be done with:

.....command.... <file.hex>

file.hex will vary, based on a programming method you choose. For Impact, you'll have to pick the firmware provided by Xilinx. For non-proprietary programming software, you may need to provide non-proprietary firmware as well.

Starting from 9.2i Alpha release, Xilinx ISE brings native userspace, libusb-based driver for their cables.

it has been proven to be possible to get it to work in FreeBSD 9-CURRENT. We simply compile our libusb on Linux and install it in the Linuxolator. It had to be modified to use our ioctl() commands, but conflict within command space exists. There's an ongoing work related with investigating, what's the best way to bring support for Linux USB in the FreeBSD

{{electronics/fpga/freebsd_xilinx/thumb_ise_after_programming.jpg}}

note about finding out a firmware for FX2 programmer note about searching through the udev configuration to see which file is the right one

So basically – not yet.

Before Xilinx started to ship , where was a kernel driver that never worked for anyone, until a reverse engineered driver for GNU/Linux for libusb appeared here: http://rmdir.de/~michael/xilinx/ still needs checking–worth for people with parallel cables

Number of “open” programming tools exist. To save you some time, I enlist tools known to me with functionality provided by them:

[1] Probably first tool to program S3ESK out-of-IDE was: http://www.rogerstech.force9.co.uk/xc3sprog/index.html, but you won't be really happy with it unless you use parallel JTAG cable.

[2] Andrew Rogers' work has been extended by “Inisyn Research” by bringing libUSB support. Project is called XUP: http://inisyn.org/src/xup/. It works (needs some hacks for FreeBSD).

[3] Above projects has been consolidated into one big program by Uwe Bonnes. The project is hosted on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xc3sprog/ Compiles and works under FreeBSD.

Programmers:

PCIII – parallel cable III

Board	Cable	Program	Command line	Contributor	Additional notes
S3BOARD	PCIII	xc3sprog	`xc3sprog -d /dev/ppi0 -i BIT file.bit -i MCS file.mcs`	Grzegorz Behrens	Removing 'Missing power' block is necessary from ioparallel.cpp

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Working with Xilinx FPGAs on FreeBSD

Introduction to free Xilinx ISE environment

System preparation

Obtaining Xilinx ISE environment

Installation procedure

FPGA processor programming

Programming Xilinx FPGAs: background

Programming from Impact

Programming without proprietary tools

Success stories

Ideas

FreeBSD WIKI