Kria™ KD240 Drives Starter Kit Tutorial

Generation of Firmware Binaries

Generation of Firmware Binaries¶

Testing Custom Accelerator/Firmware Binaries¶

Customers requiring to test custom hardware/accelerator can do so by using the following steps on the Ubuntu® platform.

It is assumed that a custom platform design has been generated using an AMD Vivado™/AMD Vitis™ and the bitstream/xclbin is available. Similarly, a correct device-tree overlay for the custom hardware is created or generated. AMD DTG could be used for the device-tree generation. Refer to the link for more information on DTG.

From previous steps, the following binaries are available:

custom-hardware.bit (obtained by Vitis or Vivado)
custom-metadata.xclbin (obtained by Vitis) (optional)
custom-devicetree.dtsi (obtained by DTG or handwritten)

On the Ubuntu platform, the bitstream header is stripped to obtain fpga configuration data as a bin object (*.bin). The metadata xclbin is consumed as is from Vitis. A runtime device-tree blob corresponding to the programmable logic (PL) bitstream is required (.dtbo) to be loaded as an overlay, which when loaded in the kernel, invokes all the drivers corresponding to the PL bitstream.

A Makefile is provided to generate the required firmware binaries and install. This Makefile takes the above binaries and provides the following outputs as follows. The artifacts of the Makefile are installed on the target device at /lib/firmware/xilinx/< app-dir >. The firmware is loaded at runtime using xmutil.

custom-hardware.bit -> custom-hardware.bin
custom-devicetree.dtsi -> custom-devicetree.dtbo

An following example has been illustrated as a reference:

git clone  https://github.com/Xilinx/kria-apps-firmware.git
cd kria-apps-firmware
mkdir -p kd240/custom
mv custom-hardware.bit custom-devicetree.dtsi kd240/custom
cp kv260/smartcam/shell.json kd240/custom
make

NOTE: The above make command will build all the firmware artifacts available in the repository. The output products will be available in the kd240/custom folder. The shell.json file is copied form an existing example as is.

For more information, refer to the instructions provided on github.com/Xilinx/kria-apps-firmware.