wiki:FAQ

Version 10 (modified by snovich, 18 years ago) (diff)

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Frequently Asked Questions

WARP Hardware

How do I format CompactFlash cards for use with the SystemACE controller?

The SystemACE controller can only use CompactFlash cards formatted as FAT12 or FAT16 drives. Starting with XP, Windows will only format drives as FAT32 or NTFS. Instead, you can use an open-source command line tool, mkdosfs, to format cards.

  1. Download mkdosfs.zip. You can read more about mkdosfs and download the source from the author's site.
  2. Unzip the program, open a Windows command prompt and change to the mkdosfs directory.
  3. Mount your CompactFlash card and look for the drive letter Windows assigns it in My Computer.
  4. Run the following command, replacing "X" with the drive letter of your CompactFlash card:
       mkdosfs -v -F 16 X:
    

I'm trying to run an Ethernet demo. I get no response when I attempt to ping the board, despite everything else working, generating and downloading properly…

This is most likely due to the clock speed your PLB bus is running at. If you've included the 10/100 Ethernet core in your project and you review the hardware generation log -- you might notice an inconveniently small block of text telling you that the bus must run at a speed greater than 65mHz for 100 Mb Ethernet connections to work. You need to either connect the board to a 10 Mb Ethernet port or regenerate your hardware platform, selecting 100MHz for the bus speed in Base System Builder.

I'm attempting to run Xilkernel and/or LWIP. Despite having all of the necessary libraries added into my C-Code, the compiler still gives me errors for undefined functions that are Xilkernel/LWIP-based.

The problem may be more general and not just limited to Xilkernel or LWIP, but rather any libraries you've included in the software platform settings menu. The common problem is that the library paths have not been added to the compiler configuration menu. The fix is as follows:

  1. Go to Applications Tab -> Expand Project View -> Right-click on "Compiler Options" and click "Set Compiler Options..."
  2. Go to "Paths" Tab and then in the "Libraries to Link against(-l)" box, make sure this field contains a value like:
       xilkernel lwip4
    

You only need to list the libraries your code requires.

I'm not getting any serial port interaction.

There are several problems that could cause this:

  1. Incorrect cable type (this is most common): the WARP FPGA board's RS-232 interface is configured exactly like a PC. In order to connect it directly to another PC, you need a null modem cable or adapter (i.e. one which cross the Tx and Rx signals).
  2. A system with a different hardware configuration has been redownloaded to WARP. In rare cases, the program running in the FPGA's PowerPC can lock up if a new system has been downloaded that has a different hardware configuration. The solution to this is to simply power cycle the board; be sure to leave the board off for a few seconds to allow the capacitors to discharge.

During Bitstream generation in XPS, the process gets stuck at "Using Options File: xflow.opt" in the output display.

This occurs when the user has insignificent read/write privelages on the computer.

I cannot get my personal peripheral repository to appear every time I open Xilinx Platform Studio

Move your peripheral repository to (or make sure it is in):

<xilinx_install_drive>:\EDK_user_repository\<folder of any name containing drivers and pcores>