Cora Z7 boot from SD card

[DavideDevoti]

Hi,

I'm making some development on Cora Z7 board and I'll need some help on the boot from SD card.

So far I've been able to develop some applications using Vivado and Vitis but always loading my applicatons from JTAG.

I tried to make the applications boot from SD card but so far it seems I'm not having success at that.

What I do is the following:

1. I generate boot.bin file from Vitis system component that includes the app component I would like to make the board execute (loading the app component from jtag works fine)

2. I put the file on a 64 GBytes micro sd card formatted as FAT32 and insert it in the board sd card slot

3. I close the mode jumper  (item 8 in the documentation at https://digilent.com/reference/programmable-logic/cora-z7/reference-manual?redirect=1)

4. I power on the board from usb connected to my laptop

After step 4 I'm expecting the board to start executing my application but no application seem to run.

There is something wrong or incomplete in what I do ?

Thanks in advance 

Davide

 

[artvvb]

Hey Davide,

Sorry for the delay. One of my colleagues, @JRys, potentially reproduced the issue and has been doing some investigating. He found that when using an SD card originally used with a Raspberry Pi, a small additional boot partition was left on the card, making it so that an equivalent Zynq board wouldn't boot - it was trying to boot from the incompatible boot partition instead of the expected one where the boot image from Vitis was loaded. Could something like this be the case with your setup?

Thanks,

Arthur

[DavideDevoti]

Hi Arthur,

thanks for you reply. Actually I tried with two different sd cards (first one 64 GBytes, second one 16 GBytes) with only one FAT32 partition and in both cases the application didn't start. So probably I have a different issue. The board I'm using is a Cora Z7-07S. At the moment I don't know if the boot.bin file I put on the sd card is not correct or if I'm doing some error in configuring the board for the proper boot source, can I have a simple boot.bin file for that board that works fine (for example a simple application that turns a led on and off) in order to check if I'm configuring correctly the board ?

Thanks

Davide

[artvvb]

See attached, built using 2023.1. Another colleague, @JColvin confirmed that it works on his hardware. When booted, it should toggle one of the RGB LEDs once per second.

cora_sd_boot_image.zip vitis_export_archive.ide.zip cora_sd.xpr.zip

[DavideDevoti]

Hi Arthur,

the boot.bin file you have shared works fine (that is I can boot it from sdcard). Anyway I have a concern about the sources you have included. I tried to open the Vivado sources that you have put in cora_sd.xpr.zip with my version of Vivado (2023.2) and it says that it has to convert them from older version etc. and it makes sense as you wrote that they were generated with version 2023.1. But I'm not able at all to open the vitis sources, the tool I'm using from the about dialog box is identified as "Vitis Unified IDE v2023.2.0", is it the correct tool to use or I need another one ?

Thanks

Davide

 

[artvvb]

Hi Davide,

We don't have much experience with 2023.2 yet and there are significant changes between it and previous versions. It's possible that there's a new bug. I'll see if we can test a boot.bin file generated in 2023.2, but I would also recommend that you install another version to work with, I've personally found 2023.1 to be reasonably stable, but it will also depend on what support materials you want to be able to use - while it's possible to use material created for an older version of the tools, there could always be differences that break things.

For 2023.2 specifically, these guides may be helpful, as the Cora and Arty Z7 are fairly similar:
Vivado - https://www.hackster.io/whitney-knitter/getting-started-with-the-arty-z7-in-vivado-2023-2-26051a
Vitis - https://www.hackster.io/whitney-knitter/getting-started-with-the-arty-z7-in-vitis-unified-ide-2023-2-1a8ee5

Thanks,

Arthur

[DavideDevoti]

Thank you, I've just installed version 2023.1  and I'm going to start to develop my application again on that version. I checked the links you have indicated but they cover only the basics up to application load through jtag (that I was already able to do) but there is no mention about boot image generation.

Please keep me updated in case you have any news about 2023.2.

Thank you very much

Davide

[DavideDevoti]

Hi,

I've tried to rebuild all my application using 2023.1 tools and boot image works fine. 

Thanks

Davide