HDL Tools

This repo contains a vagrant box to bring up Verilog tools and Vivado into a working development environment that can connect to and program Digilent boards.

What you will need

• 16GB of free disk space.
  • About 8GB can be reclaimed after install.
• Virtualbox
  • # apt-get install virtualbox
  • # apt-get install virtualbox-guest-additions-iso
• Oracle VM Virtualbox Extension Pack
  • Download from here, and make sure the version downloaded matches your Virtualbox version.
  • You will most likely need to download an older version, as the version of virtualbox in apt repos is old.
  • Then, vboxmanage extpack install --replace /path/to/ext-pack or open the gui and go to File>Preferences>Extensions, click the square with the yellow triangle, and find the file.
  • If you ever update Virtualbox, you will need to update the extensionpack to match it.
• Vagrant
  • and plugins vagrant-vbguest and vagrant-reload
  • vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
  • vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload
• Yourself added to vboxusers group if on Linux.
  • # usermod -aG vboxusers $USER
  • Sign out and then back in.
  • Check by typing groups
• Patience.

What you will need to move into this repo folder

• CA16.box, which you'll (soon) be able to find on public, or get from a TA.

Getting Started

• Close anything you don't need,
• In this repo's root folder, run vagrant box add CA16 CA16.box
  • This will take awhile, the box is pretty large.
• Run vagrant up. The first time this command is issued will also take awhile.
• When the desktop boots login as user vagrant with password vagrant
• The folder with Vagrantfile in it (this one) will be shared to the VM at /vagrant
• To poweroff, run vagrant halt in this directory.
• To remove the machine completely and reclaim disk space run vagrant destroy
  • And you'll want to delete ~/.vagrant.d/boxes/CA16 if you're really trying to forget Comp Arch ever existed at the end of the semester.

Running and verifying Vivado installation

• Launch with bash ./start_vivado.sh in /vagrant
  • Be careful, it's /vagrant NOT /home/vagrant/
• Setting up License
  • Apparently not necessary anymore (p 75)!
• Plug the Zybo into the host machine and ensure that it appears when you run lsusb in the VM, or open Vivado in the VM and try to connect in hardware manager.

Tips

Can't find the ZYBO board.

• Are you plugged into PROG/UART on the board?
  • Not the micro under the USB A.
• Is the board on?
• Can the host machine see the board as a usb device?
• Have you added yourself to vboxusers?
• Does Future Technology Devices International Device appear in lsusb?
• If you open the virtualbox GUI, is the USB controller attached?

Synthesis/Implementation is REALLY slow.

• Edit Vagrantfile and give the machine more memory or CPUs.
• This process is naturally not very fast to begin with.