REDS blog

In the previous post we prepared a setup with a FriendlyElec NanoPC-T4 single board computer (SBC) we connected it through PCIe to a host computer. This time we will setup a Pine64 Rockpro64 board which comes with a more convenient PCIe 4x female edge connector instead of an M.2 slot. Both boards are based on the same Hexa-Core Rockchip RK3399 chip. In this post we will explore how to build a custom Linux kernel and load a PCIe endpoint function…

An ARM single board computer as PCIe card !?! (part 1)

June 5, 2023

Socfpga

In this blog post series I will show how we can use an ARM single board computer (SBC) as a PCIe card (PCIe endpoint). At REDS when developing PCIe based devices we usually rely on FPGAs, for example to develop FPGA PCIe accelerators. These are often based on existing PCIe cards from AMD (Xilinx) and Intel (Altera). For example the Xilinx Alveo series or Zynq based development boards. To develop accelerators such cards are fine and the development boards allow…

How to apply patches from the Linux Kernel Mailing List

March 1, 2023

The Linux Kernel is under constant development and improvement. Everyday patches are submitted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Some of these patches get accepted and merged into the mainline Linux kernel and become available to the user, other patches never do. Sometimes it is useful to get patches from the LKML, for example if you are developing in the kernel or simply because you want to stay at the bleeding edge. Another reason could be that you need…

FreeRTOS + POSIX on Zynq

June 7, 2022

FreeRTOS is a popular free and open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded platforms. It has its own scheduler, tasks, and synchronisation primitives. Writing concurrent applications for FreeRTOS requires to learn the environment and make use of the provided tools. In some cases, a developper might want to port an existing concurrent application written with POSIX interfaces (such as pthreads, semaphores, message queues, etc.). Usually there are two approaches here : Convert everything to FreeRTOS primitives. Write an OS abstraction…

NVMe emulation in QEMU – Adding custom admin and IO commands

March 18, 2022

Tutorial, Virtualization

2 Comments

QEMU is a wonderful system emulator capable of running full x86 systems with PCIe and NVMe amongst many other platforms. QEMU is not only versatile, very fast, but also open-source ! At REDS we use QEMU to facilitate development of hardware through emulation, for example emulating FPGA platforms in software before going to real hardware, e.g., Full System Simulation (FSS), Zynq Software-Hardware CoSimulation. The full visibility over the system through emulation make development and debugging very effective. With a QEMU…

eclipse for nRF5 SDK installation guide

February 3, 2022

Nicolas Brunner

Tutorial

Introduction nRF5 SDK allows the development of software for the nRF51 and nRF52 SoCs. Nordic Semiconductor promotes the use of the nRF Connect SDK, but I found it complex to use because it doesn’t allow bare metal (it works with the RTOS Zephyr Project) and force you to use new tools like DeviceTree and CMake that I’m not proficient with. Nordic Semiconductor offers a free license to SEGGER Embedded Studio for development with nRF chips, but if you are like…

eclipse for nRF5 SDK using example

February 3, 2022

Nicolas Brunner

Tutorial

Introduction In the previous article, we have learnt how to install the IDE. We will now use an example provided by the nRF5 SDK. We should be able to directly build the example found in the SDK, but I don’t like this method because we often need to make some changes and I like to keep the SDK in a pristine state. In this post, we will use the blinky example for the nRF52840DK (pca10056) found in nRF5 SDK 17.1.0.…

Accessing the RAM of a QEMU Emulated System from another Process

February 4, 2021

Tutorial, Virtualization

2 Comments

Sometimes it may be of interest to expose the RAM of a hardware platform emulated in QEMU to an outside process, e.g., for monitoring, testing, or co-simulation. The QEMU monitor allows to inspect the memory but is not necessarily the most practical tool when you need to access it from another process, e.g., a C program or an external simulator, maybe Questasim simulating a device written in SystemVerilog. In this post I will show how to make the memory of…

Présentation des travaux de Bachelor de nos étudiants

September 29, 2020

Mathilde Chammartin