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FPGA incremental build

Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2014 4:12 pm
by hmaarrfk
Hello,

I'm working on a project that involves adding additional FPGA compatibility. My current process for building the fpga is to clean the FPGA directory, and to rebuild the 'boot.bin' file. This process takes about 8 minutes.

I'm considering trying to use some of the incremental build capabilities of Vivado to speed up this process. Unfortunately, I have no experience with them and wanted to avoid duplicating any of your efforts. I was wondering if the RedPitaya team had looked into the possibility of using the features. In some sense, I'm hoping that you already have added this feature in some nightly makefile that you could push to the public.

Thanks for your help,

Re: FPGA incremental build

Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 3:27 pm
by hmaarrfk
For anybody who is interested:

So I got very tired of my 8.5 minute compile time and decided test incremental compilation myself.

I patched up the build process in a way that hopefully minimizes any large modification to the build process.

you can see them at my fork:

https://github.com/hmaarrfk/RedPitaya
It has a few other modifications that I think are quite useful if you are developping for the FPGA itself.

A costly operation in the build process is launching vivado itself. Checking for licenses takes 5-30 seconds on some computer....... Vivado gets launched 3 or 4 times because of the intricacies of how the system is compiled.

On my desktop i5 (16 gigs of ram), the compile time for the FPGA part when down from 5 minutes to 3.5 and on my AMD (can't get you processor specs right now) (12 gigs of ram), the compile time went down from 8.5 mins to 6.5 maybe even 4 (compile time isn't a hard rule).

Re: FPGA incremental build

Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2014 4:30 am
by emyemy
Hey, can you tell me the steps you take to make the boot.bin? I am using the make file, and there seems to be so many problems coming out. I want to know how you make it through. Thanks!

Re: FPGA incremental build

Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2014 5:23 am
by hmaarrfk
Hi,

Are you able to compile the RedPitaya code directly from the original repository???
If not, take a look at my guide
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=49

I made myself a new directory, and entered these commands

Code: Select all

git clone git@github.com:hmaarrfk/RedPitaya.git
source /opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2013.3/settings64.sh
make -C RedPitaya build/boot.bin
Output:

Code: Select all

make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mark/test/RedPitaya/FPGA'
bootgen -image b.bif -w -o i build/boot.bin
make: Leaving directory `/home/mark/test/RedPitaya'
RedPitaya patches a few files in the build process, so a second pass through the build process sometimes triggers a warning, which I just press yes to.