REDS blog – Page 2 – REDS Institute, HEIG-VD

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

Rick Wertenbroek

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

No Comments

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

No Comments

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

Rick Wertenbroek

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

Uncategorized

No Comments

Durant le mois de septembre, nos étudiants ont présenté leurs travaux de Bachelor sous la direction de leurs professeurs respectifs. Nous leur souhaitons à tous plein succès pour leur avenir ! Professeur Alberto Dassatti Carpita Edoardo – “Amélioration des performances du module GRIDEYE” Eduardo a évalué et profilé en profondeur le traitement effectué sur un module commercial exécutant Linux sur ARM. Il a pu identifier quelques problèmes et proposer des solutions conduisant à une réduction de la charge des processeurs…

A guide to compile and install a Xenomai-patched kernel

September 16, 2020

Lucas Elisei

Tutorial

5 Comments

This tutorial will present how to compile and install a Xenomai-patched Linux kernel. Moreover, we will build Debian packages to ease the installation process. At the time of writing, the most recent stable version of Xenomai is 3.1 and the latest supported Linux kernel version is 4.19.89. However, these instructions should be valid for past and future versions. All the instructions have been executed on a machine running Ubuntu 20.04. Pre-requisites Install the following required packages: Download required files From…

La reconfiguration partielle sur FPGA pour des applications dans les appareils de radio définie par logiciel (SDR)

June 30, 2020

Sara Grassi

SDR

No Comments

L’une des spécialités de l’institut REDS est le développement de systèmes reconfigurables à haute performance, et l’une de ses activités principales est la radio définie par logiciel – Software Defined Radio (SDR). La faisabilité de la reconfiguration partielle sur des circuits FPGA contenus dans des appareils SDR a été démontré dans le cadre du projet SDR-Makerspace avec la tâche SDR’s FPGA Partial reconfiguration. Ce projet est mené par le REDS en collaboration avec la Libre Space Foundation et il est…

Exploring GNU Radio performance in 2020

June 29, 2020

Alberto Dassatti

HPC, SDR

No Comments

It was 2018 when I first wrote a post about bench-marking in GNU Radio. This post will expand on that, focusing on one technology I am experimenting with (eBPF) and a bit hack. This year I taught a class on High Performance Coding and one of the chapters introduces some bit hacks. Reading the excellent material from MIT 6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems, I stumbled upon the modular addition bit hack implementation. Considering that what I did in the…

Adding Build and Version Control Information in FPGA Bitstream

June 2, 2020

Rick Wertenbroek

Socfpga

2 Comments

When handling FPGA bitstreams it would be nice to have a way to extract build and version information from them, especially when working with hardware-software designs. After generating a few different versions of a bitstream for a project it can be easy to lose track, especially when the design changes are not just incremental but alternative, e.g., to compare performance between possible implementations. In this post we will look at how to add build and version information to an FPGA…