April 10, 2022

Xilinx Zynq - XC7Z010 - Installing Vitis

I did this on a Sunday afternoon and it took a very long time. The download was extremely slow (about 4 hours) and this is their slow server, not my connection (as I downloaded Google earth the same day in mere seconds). Then the install itself took nearly 2 hours. Running "top" to see what was going on (there was an insane amount of disk noise), I saw Java grinding away at the top of the listing. Oh, how we hate Java.

But it seems to be done now. A popup is showing a message about running some install script in order to get the ACAP tools, whatever they are and should I want them, but I just accidentally dismissed that before I could copy the message details. Ah, well.

Something called the Xilinx information center is now on my dock at the bottom right and can be used to manage installs and such. And I see a host of new desktop icons.

Is Vitis the answer?

Xilinx (now owned by AMD) apparently thinks it is. I am not so sure. It seems to want you to write C++ code, which I am violently opposed to. And it wants you to use a library called OpenCL, which sits on top of XRT (Xilinx Runtime Library).

A tutorial I watched and enjoyed was using the SDK along with good old C code and using functions like XGpio_*. We will look into that, even though Xilinx seems to be deprecating it.

Get the SDK

I found a link in the above post that would give me the 2019 SDK. This gave me (after I gave my Xilinx credentials) a file Xilinx_SDK_2019.1_0524_1430_Lin64.bin. This is some kind of sh archive, so I chmod a+x on it and run it. It tells me that a more recent kit (2021.2 is available), but I tell it to press on with 2019.1. It launches an installer that now wants to download more files. I tell it to download them onto my machine rather than directly installing them. It looks like it is putting them into: 
/u1/Xilinx/Downloads/2019.1/payload
I make a tarball of these, then repeat the whole thing again, but let it immediately install. I get 3 choices: XDSK, XSCT, or BootGen. I select XSDK. It wants to install to /tools/Xilinx, which is fine. It will go to /tools/Xilinx/SDK/2019.1

Now I go for a 3rd time. I have to move /tools/Xilinx/SDK off to the side before it will run for me. Now I choose the 2021.2 design tools option. Aha -- this is leading me to the 2021.2 Vivado ML that I already have, so never mind. I put SDK back where it belongs and call it quits.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org