Kria™ KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit Tutorial

Generation of Firmware Binaries

Generation of Firmware Binaries¶

Testing Custom Accelerator/Firmware Binaries¶

Customers required 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 AMD Vivado™/Vitis™, and the bitstream/xclbin is available. Similarly, a correct device-tree overlay for the custom hardware is created or generated; the AMD DTG could be used for device-tree generation. Refer to the link for more info on DTG.

From previous steps, the following binaries are available:

custom-hardware.bit (obtained by Vivado or Vitis)
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 the FPGA configuration data as a bin object (*.bin). The metadata xclbin is consumed as is from Vitis. A runtime devicetree blob corresponding to the programmable (PL) bitstream is required (.dtbo) to be loaded as an overlay, which when loaded in 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. The artifacts of the makefile are installed on the target device at /lib/firmware/xilinx/< accelerator-dir. The firmware is loaded at runtime using xmutil.

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

The following example is illustrated for reference:

git clone --branch xlnx_rel_v2022.1 https://github.com/Xilinx/kria-apps-firmware.git
cd kria-apps-firmware
mkdir -p kv260/custom
mv custom-hardware.bit custom-metadata.xclbin custom-devicetree.dtsi kv260/custom
cp kv260/smartcam/shell.json kv260/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 kv260/custom folder. The shell.json file is copied form an existing example as is.

For more information, refer to the instructions provided in the README file here.

Next Steps¶

Go back to the KV260 SOM Designs Start Page

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