GNU Radio on Zedboard

GNU Radio
1

Hello everyone,

I’m going through the instructions from here:

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq

to get a working image with gnu radio for my zedboard.

Unfortunately I can’t get the board to boot with this image. I was
wondering if someone can help me.

what I tried so far ( all failed - can’t boot from the SDCard):

  • default settings in the instructions
  • renaming u-boot.bin to boot.bin
  • renaming u-boot.bin to BOOT.BIN
  • renaming uImage–zedboard-zynq7.dtb to devicetree.dtb
  • I tried command line as well as gparted gui.

what I checked:

  • download a linux from XillyBus and boot the board with SDCard → works

v/r
Alireza

2

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 1:17 PM, Alireza Khodamoradi
[email protected]
wrote:

  • download a linux from XillyBus and boot the board with SDCard → works

v/r
Alireza

Can you provide details about how it’s not booting? Are you monitoring
the
boot sequence over the tty connection (/dev/ttyACM0, usually). I’ve
noticed
bugs on my system where the u-boot sequence doesn’t kick off properly,
so I
have to go in over the serial connection to actually call ‘boot’ to get
it
to run. (I’m sure this problem is something that I’ve done to myself.)

Tom

3

On 03/13/2015 01:17 PM, Alireza Khodamoradi wrote:

Hello everyone,

I’m going through the instructions from here:

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq

I should go over those carefully, but in the mentime I have some images
built for the zedbaord here:

Take the zedboard one, uncompress it and write it to an sd card. Be sure
to unmount (not eject) the sd card and run:

sudo dd if=sdimage-8G-zedboard.direct of=/dev/sdX

where sdx is the device the sd card is on.

Philip

4

Hi Tom,

I connected my UART to /dev/ttyACM0. Here are the result:

-With the image from Xillybus:

I see the boot sequence and it works fine.

-With the image from
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq

I get nothing!

Am I overlooking something very obvious?

v/r
Alireza

5

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 7:40 PM, Alireza Khodamoradi <
[email protected]> wrote:

I get nothing!

Am I overlooking something very obvious?

v/r
Alireza

That Zynq page probably needs some updating.

But otherwise, try Philip’s suggestion in his response to you. A few of
us
have tested it and can confirm it boots fine.

Tom

6

Philip,

Thank you for letting me using your images. I tried both of them with
the *dd
*command, it took me around 2000 seconds (30 mins) each and after using
them on the board I get the following message via the UART:

U-Boot SPL 2014.01 (Jan 09 2015 - 20:24:45)
mmc boot
reading fpga.bin
spl: error reding image fpga.bin, err - -1
reading system.dtb
spl: error reading image system.dtb, err - -1
reading u-boot.img
spl: error reading image u-boot.img, err - -1
### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

I got the above message for sdimage-8G-zc702.direct. I get no message
for
the other image.

What am I doing wrong?

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Philip B. [email protected]

7

On 03/18/2015 10:44 PM, Alireza Khodamoradi wrote:

reading system.dtb
spl: error reading image system.dtb, err - -1
reading u-boot.img
spl: error reading image u-boot.img, err - -1
### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

So the first stage boot loader is running, which is good.

It looks for a couple of files which should be there, which is OK.
(fpga.bin and system.dtb)

Then it tries to load u-boot.img which it doesn’t find. This is bad.

Can you put the card in a PC and send the list of file in the FAT
partition?

Philip

8

On 03/19/2015 10:48 AM, Alireza Khodamoradi wrote:

Here are the files I have in the FAT partition (boot):

1- boot.bin
2- u-boot.img
3- uEnv.txt
4- uImage
5- zc702-zynq7.dtb

  • I used this image: sdimage-8G-zc702.direct

So this all looks correct. When you put the card in the PC both the FAT
and roofs partitions are mounted OK? You did use an 8G card?

I’m not sure what to say at this point. Everything looks OK. I am
traveling and away from borads for a few weeks.

Philip

9

Here are the files I have in the FAT partition (boot):

1- boot.bin
2- u-boot.img
3- uEnv.txt
4- uImage
5- zc702-zynq7.dtb

  • I used this image: sdimage-8G-zc702.direct

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 6:41 AM, Philip B. [email protected]

10

On 03/31/2015 11:39 AM, Alireza Khodamoradi wrote:

has startx , is there any way for me to get the VGA working?
I’d ask on the meta-xilinx list. We use hte BSP from Xilinx, which I do
not think has support for the video display. For that you need a special
driver (and I believe you need some stuff in the fpga). The build we
have doesn’t depend on anything loaded in the fpga.

Philip

11

Philip,

I got it working. For some reason if I use Ubuntu’s Archive Manager on
my
laptop to uncompress the .xz file, it doesn’t work!

I had to uncompress it by this command: unxz -d
sdimage-8G-zedboard.direct.xz in order to get it work.

Now I have a linux running on the zedboard with the gnu-radio. But I
can’t
get the VGA to work - I have to use UART to connect to the linux - I saw
it
has startx , is there any way for me to get the VGA working?

Thank you,
Alireza

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 6:54 AM, Philip B. [email protected]

12

Thank you Philip!

I also don’t have the audio jack working. Should I ask it on the
meta-xilinx list?

13

On 04/01/2015 04:53 PM, Alireza Khodamoradi wrote:

Thank you Philip!

I also don’t have the audio jack working. Should I ask it on the
meta-xilinx list?

Bug them. It is also likely a driver issue. My understanding is there
are a bunch of analog devices parts on the board that they wrote drivers
for. I’m not sure if those drivers made it into upstream Linux, and then
you have the issue of the best kernel for our purposes is about 3.14.

Philip

14

Philip B. wrote:

On 04/01/2015 04:53 PM, Alireza Khodamoradi wrote:

Thank you Philip!

I also don’t have the audio jack working. Should I ask it on the
meta-xilinx list?

Bug them. It is also likely a driver issue. My understanding is there are a
bunch of
analog devices parts on the board that they wrote drivers for.

There is a different kernel that we (Analog Device’s) maintains, which
includes both ALSA drivers
for the audio chip (ADAU1761) and the HDMI output (ADV7511).

there are a few zynq branches in there. Normally Xilinx pulls drivers
from there for their kernels,
but anyone can do the same.

Our build instructions (if that’s the sort of thing you want to do) is
at:
http://wiki.analog.com/resources/eval/user-guides/ad-fmcomms2-ebz/software/linux/zynq_2014r2

We provide binaries for Zed which includes a 3.17 kernel and Xbuntu/xfce
for many of
the FMC prototyping cards we make.

This does include GNURadio (3.7.4) binary, which some people
used/contributed.
This doesn’t support the GNURadio FPGA accelerator work that was done.
(if that is
what you were really looking for).

I’m not sure if
those drivers made it into upstream Linux, and then you have the issue of the
best kernel for our purposes is about 3.14.

Upstream - it’s hard to upstream the device side, when Xilinx hasn’t
upstream the DMA side.
Greg (and others) do not like half a driver. Things are getting better
now, and we need to
focus on that more.

-Robin