Learning Vitis: 3 How to build an Example Application

If you have not already checked out the previous blogs do so now!

Learning Vitis: 1 Setting up a Virtual Machine

Learning Vitis: 2 How to Download and "install" a pre-built platform

Once you have completed those, you are in a position to use the platforms in the platform repository!

We are going to pick up right where the "Download and "install" a pre-built platform" blog left off.  We not have our platform in a repository and we can access it!

So, what now?

Well, select the UltraZed-EG IOCC's platform and click next of course!

From here, we see a menu that asks about what Domain and what Sysroot Path we want.  Both are good as defaults!  If you want to know more about this, Domains are described in the SDSoC Technical Training Course.  While not the same tool, Vitis and SDSoC (as well as SDACCEL) all come from the same heritage so the terms mostly apply and are compatible.  Click Next!

From here, if you have NOT downloaded the Vitis IDE Examples, you typically will only see Empty and Vector Addition for templates.  If you have you will see MANY more.  To keep this simple for you to follow (this is a BLOG after all!), let's choose Vector Addition, then Finish.

Once Vitis is done scanning files, let's change the Active build configuration to "Hardware."  We have to do this because as of this post, we have not implemented the Emulation portions of the platforms.  This means you will see an error building after ~10 seconds of build time.  This is because the platform cannot provide the proper inputs for it's output!  If you look in the Avnet Vitis repository, the hooks are in place to provide this to the platform, but as of this time, the actual inputs are not available.

Now we can right click the Application and Build!

After some period of time (between the options that I have to build 45 minutes - 2 hours), you end up with an SDCARD folder that contains all of the files you need to copy to your SDCARD's FAT32 partition!

This is true for UltraZed-EG IOCC,UltraZed-EG PCIeCC, and UltraZed-EV.

You will also notice a rootfs.tar.gz file

For the Ultra96V2, you will need to extract the rootfs to the EXT4 partition of your SDCARD.  Instructions for this will be found in another Learning Vitis Blog!

While this is building, you can explore a bit.  Notice the [H] next to this function?

also notice that this is listed under the Hardware Functions?

There are many ways to decide which functions to accelerate.  You can KNOW, you can test and adjust, you can even perform a performance analysis and let the tool tell you what IT thinks is the most used function.  In our case, selecting the example defaulted this to hardware accelerated.

Look forward to my next blog, where I will show how to test the application!