Ultra96-V2 Xilinx Zynq Cortex-R5 support

[Juan Solano]

Thanks Joel and Kinsey,

I agree that QEMU is a good option to get familiar with the OS, but while learning, I am also doing some benchmarks and comparing performance on a number of boards I have around. I have a Hercules Cortex-R5 board but this is not supported and I don't think any other current BSP supports R5, or for that matter, any newer design like R8 or R52. I wonder why I don't see more traction on Cortex-R in general in the scientific or real-time community. Perhaps it is used more broadly on custom designs and there are not so many off-the-shelf boards.

There is a BSP for a TI Hercules R4 but I was expecting not to diverge too much as I am not very familiar with the Cortex-R family and it would take me quite some time to adapt it to Cortex-R5. After all I am doing this in my spare time and I was hoping to get familiar with the system and get a feeling on how the HW performs without going deep in integrating a new board.

The Trenz board looks quite good, I will have a look. On the other hand, I hear that the Avnet board is used for research / prototyping by some groups in ESA.

Regards,
Juan.


On Sat, 20 Feb 2021, at 12:05 AM, Kinsey Moore wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 4:43 PM Joel Sherrill wrote:

>  

> I've cc'ed Kinsey Moore and asked him to subscribe to this list so he can reply.

>  

> On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 11:46 AM Juan Solano <jsm at jsolano.com> wrote:


>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I was looking for a bsp that supports a Cortex-R5 board and it seems the only one available is the Xilinx Zynq bsp, is that correct? It was not clear to me if this bsp is working on the Cortex-R5 processors of the board.

>  

> Kinsey did an R5 for a custom SOC that never saw silicon. He can tell you what is in RTEMS and give you an idea what needs to be done.

>  

> It was actually a Cortex-R52, but the work was never finished or polished for submission. It’s publicly available here: https://github.com/ISI-apex/rtems/tree/hpsc-1.3/bsps/arm/gen-r52/

>  

> It was a relatively complicated custom board (and QEMU environment), so while the peripherals and core CPU support may be useful the remainder is unlikely to be.

>  

> The Cortex-R5 CPUs on the Zynq Ultrasacle+ MPSoC do not currently have a BSP, but I imagine a basic BSP could be brought up relatively quickly. The arm/xilinx_zynqmp BSP actually targets the A53 cores in 32bit/ARMv7 mode.

>  

> I think as part of the aarch64 port Kinsey has submitted, we looked at this board and decided not to get it because it didn't have wired Ethernet. Someone has told me there is an add-on shield to add it, But I don't know for sure or have a link to that.

>  

> Kinsey has been using another Avnet board and a board from Trenz. Both have wired networking.

>  

> If you haven’t yet purchased a board, I’d highly recommend the Trenz board for cost reasons. It also has a PHY that’s already supported in LibBSD. https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0802-02-2AEU2-A-MPSoC-Development-Board-with-Xilinx-Zynq-UltraScale-ZU2-and-LPDDR4

>  


>> 
>> Is the Avnet Ultra96-V2 a good recommendation to experiment with? I am currently just learning RTEMS, which makes other boards too expensive for my needs.

>  

> If you are just learning RTEMS, the first step we always recommend is a simulator since they are free. Qemu has a Zynq simulation which I think all the core developers use from time to time. Kinsey has spent a lot of time on Qemu for the aarch64 and there are BSPs in the tree for that. He is close to another round of submissions which he should talk about.

>  

> The user manual has been updated with information on how to start QEMU for both the generic Cortex-A53 BSP and also for the zynqmp BSP. There are some more details for network on QEMU, but that will also be getting posted when the rest of the patches go up.

>  

> Simulators are great for getting familiar with things. The same cross toolchain can be used and it is just a matter of switching BSPs. It works as long as the simulator has enough IO for your initial steps.

>  

> Let me know if you have any questions about any of this.

>  

> Kinsey

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