Tutorial: Creating a Custom Bitfile
This page covers the creation and installation of a custom personality/bitfile (a modification of the vector adder sample project).
Building a Bitfile
Copy rev 2011_11_22 of the example project and set your environment variables if you have not done so already. You can make a small modification to the verilog code if you wish.
cd ~/pdk_sample/cae_vadd/phys make
The bitfile will take a long time (2 to 4 hours; sometimes perhaps 10 hours) to create. Be patient.
Packaging the Bitfile
cd ~/pdk_sample/cae_vadd/phys make release
This will create a new directory (~/pdk_sample/cae_vadd.release/). Then something magical happens that I don't quite understand yet.
Installing the Bitfile
Any ideas? Intuition tells me we'd need higher privilledges to install the RPM to the /opt/convey/personalities/ folder.
Using the Bitfile in C Code
My current understanding is that running a routine on the coprocessor requires two parts:
- A call to the cny_get_signature function to get the signature of the custom personality you created
- A cny coprocessor funcation call (ex: l_copcall_fmt)
If you want to pass parameters to your function call, the vector adder set the standard of using an assembly file to marshal registers back and forth between the processor / coprocessor, though there may be other ways.
References
- Convey PDK Reference Manual (.pdf) - Sections 9.4.6, 9.4.7, 10 and Appendix D
- Convey PDK Reference Manual V3 - Sections 8.5-8.7, 9, and Appendix D