GNU Radio support on MicroZed

GNU Radio
1

I’m not the world’s foremost expert in OpenEmbedded (read: person with
nearly no knowledge of how to use it). I’d like to get GNU Radio working
on a MicroZed. Unfortunately that board is not among the boards
supported as mentioned here:
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq Also, I don’t
necessarily need John Pendlum’s changes to add userspace support for
interfacing with the FPGA. I just want to get the ARM running GNU Radio.

The meta-xilinx-community repo claims to support a BSP and build for
MicroZed:
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/meta-xilinx-community/about/
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/meta-xilinx-community/about/
How do I go about merging these two things together? I’ve taken my best
guess as to how to setup a configuration with Poky:

Build Configuration:
BB_VERSION = “1.23.1”
BUILD_SYS = “x86_64-linux”
NATIVELSBSTRING = “Ubuntu-13.10”
TARGET_SYS = “arm-poky-linux-gnueabi”
MACHINE = “microzed-zynq7”
DISTRO = “poky”
DISTRO_VERSION = “1.6+snapshot-20140822”
TUNE_FEATURES = " arm armv7a vfp neon zynq"
TARGET_FPU = “vfp-neon”
meta
meta-yocto
meta-yocto-bsp = “master:34436672f3ef4915e7526770a0fa8dcff328f93d”
meta-xilinx = “master:83bf54daeaca21879290bf444876f9949b117454”
meta-xilinx-community =
“master:a093287b81d446435d44cf238a9240782a80e1b7”
meta-oe
meta-networking
meta-filesystems = “master:8f637f9bbcdda1dc7a1998d243708c727aa6016f”
meta-sdr = “master:21e2722a5e6671fd98268241f216e087f279566d”

?Am I on the right track here? It’s still fetching/building/etc. I’m not
too confident it will actually work, since I don’t really know what I’m
doing.

Thanks,
Sean

2

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 7:10 PM, Nowlan, Sean
[email protected] wrote:

MicroZed:
MACHINE = “microzed-zynq7”
meta-networking
meta-filesystems = “master:8f637f9bbcdda1dc7a1998d243708c727aa6016f”
meta-sdr = “master:21e2722a5e6671fd98268241f216e087f279566d”

Am I on the right track here? It’s still fetching/building/etc. I’m not too
confident it will actually work, since I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Thanks,
Sean

Hi Sean,

The embedded page might be more useful:
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/embedded Especially
check out the link to SDKs. There’s a rootfs and modules built for a
zedboard, all you’ll need are device specific boot files. Just create
the right partitions on your card and the provided rootfs and modules
should be sufficient. (extract the rootfs to the / mounted partition
on the SD card). Hopefully that can get you booting

Nathan

3

Hi Sean,

Is the Linaro distribution possible on MicroZed? I spent a long time
trying
to get OpenEmbedded to happen with no success. The Linaro distribution
was
a snap and I got GNURadio running no problem on the ZedBoard.

Stephen

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 6:55 PM, West, Nathan
[email protected]

4

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 11:42 PM, Stephen Harrison
<[email protected]

wrote:

Hi Sean,

Is the Linaro distribution possible on MicroZed? I spent a long time
trying to get OpenEmbedded to happen with no success. The Linaro
distribution was a snap and I got GNURadio running no problem on the
ZedBoard.

Stephen

For reference on getting OE working, see our Embedded page:

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

Though I can’t speak directly to the MicroZed.

Tom

5

On 08/26/2014 02:31 PM, Nowlan, Sean wrote:

Is the Linaro distribution possible on MicroZed? I spent a long time trying to
get OpenEmbedded to happen with no success. The Linaro distribution was a snap and
I got GNURadio running no problem on the ZedBoard.

Thanks, all, for the pointers. Ill see if I can get MicroZed boot files to
launch into the GNU Radio rootfs image.

Be careful what branch of meta-xilinx-community you use. If it is
useful, I can look at adding it to the repo manifest to try and keep
things in sync.

Philip

6

From: discuss-gnuradio-bounces+sean.nowlan=removed_email_address@domain.invalid
[mailto:discuss-gnuradio-bounces+sean.nowlan=removed_email_address@domain.invalid] On
Behalf Of Tom R.
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 10:10 AM
To: Stephen Harrison
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio support on MicroZed

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 11:42 PM, Stephen Harrison
<[email protected]mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Sean,

Is the Linaro distribution possible on MicroZed? I spent a long time
trying to get OpenEmbedded to happen with no success. The Linaro
distribution was a snap and I got GNURadio running no problem on the
ZedBoard.

Stephen

For reference on getting OE working, see our Embedded page:

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

Though I can’t speak directly to the MicroZed.

Tom

Thanks, all, for the pointers. I’ll see if I can get MicroZed boot files
to launch into the GNU Radio rootfs image.

Thanks,
Sean

On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 6:55 PM, West, Nathan
<[email protected]mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 7:10 PM, Nowlan, Sean
<[email protected]mailto:[email protected]> wrote:

MicroZed:
MACHINE = “microzed-zynq7”
meta-networking
meta-filesystems = “master:8f637f9bbcdda1dc7a1998d243708c727aa6016f”
meta-sdr = “master:21e2722a5e6671fd98268241f216e087f279566d”

Am I on the right track here? It’s still fetching/building/etc. I’m not too
confident it will actually work, since I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Thanks,
Sean

Hi Sean,

The embedded page might be more useful:
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/embedded Especially
check out the link to SDKs. There’s a rootfs and modules built for a
zedboard, all you’ll need are device specific boot files. Just create
the right partitions on your card and the provided rootfs and modules
should be sufficient. (extract the rootfs to the / mounted partition
on the SD card). Hopefully that can get you booting

Nathan

7

Be careful what branch of meta-xilinx-community you use. If it is useful, I can
look at adding it to the repo manifest to try and keep things in sync.

I tried bitbaking again and ran into problems. I used the daisy branch
on meta-xilinx-community. I also replaced GitHub - Xilinx/meta-xilinx: Xilinx device and board support for Yocto/OE-core.
with meta-xilinx - Layer containing Xilinx hardware support metadata in repo manifest.xml, also using
daisy branch. I initially used the directions at
GitHub - balister/oe-gnuradio-manifest to set everything up
and then made the aforementioned changes, and added
meta-xilinx-community to bblayers.conf. No dice. Do you know if Yocto’s
and Xilinx’s meta-xilinx layers are too different to be substituted? Is
there a way to pull the microzed-zynq7 machine diffs into
Xilinx/meta-xilinx? I’m kind of surprised Xilinx hasn’t already added
MicroZed support there.