alveo-sw

This repo contains the supporting software infrstructure to control and monitor Alveos with the SARAO (CASPER) toolflow. It runs in a linux environment and has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04. It also relies on the Alveo cards being "FLASHED" with the SARAO BSP. For further details on this, please see Alveo Board Support Packages. It furthermore expects a Xilinx jtag programmer to be used to configure (program) the Alveo with the "runtime" fpga images (ie .fpg or .bit files).

Getting Started

From the shell, do the following steps:

Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/ska-sa/alveo-sw.git
cd alveo-sw/

Initialise the git submodules

git submodule init
git submodule update

Now it is necessary to configure the infrastructure for the current host. This can be done by executing the following script on the command line

./configure

The software infrastructure relies on some python dependencies. Among these is the creation of a python executable (pex) environment which contains the dependencies required to run the python alveo katcp server. In order to generate this pex dependency, the following needs to be done

1. create a python3.8 virtual environment

python3.8 -m venv alveo_venv

2. launch the virtual environmnet

source alveo_venv/bin/activate

3. install the pex package

pip3.8 install pex

4. change directory to the alveo-katcp-svr directory and run make

cd alveo-katcp-svr
make
cd ..

5. deactivate the vrtual environment

deactivate

Now that the python dependencies have been built, the software infrastructure can be installed from within the parent alveo-sw directory

sudo make install

Reboot the host machine

sudo reboot

At this point, the Alveo supporting software infratructure shoud have be deployed and running. Some basic sanity checks to ensure that the required software is running correctly can be found in the alveo-sw troubleshooting guide.

The casperfpga branch with alveo support can now be used to connect to the Alveo cards.

---

System startup

The following block diagram shows the various linux processes involved in launching the alveo-katcp-svr.

┌───────────────┐
│               │
│  linux boot   │
│               │
└──────┬────────┘
       │
       │
┌──────▼────────┐
│  modprobe     │ /etc/modprobe.d/xdma.conf
├───────────────┤
│   load xdma   │
│ kernel module │
└──────┬────────┘
       │
       │
       │
┌──────▼────────┐
│  udev         │ /etc/udev/rules.d/60-xdma.rules
├───────────────┤
│ configure /dev│
│ entries       │
└──────┬────────┘
       │
       │
       │
┌──────▼────────┐
│ systemd       │ /etc/systemd/system/alveo-katcp-svr.service
├───────────────┤
│launch alveo   │
│services       │
└──────┬────────┘
       │
       │
       │
┌──────▼────────┐
│               │
│alveo-katcp-svr│
│               │
└───────────────┘