Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio on Zynq - trouble getting the user_peripheral kernel module to work

[Philip Balister]

On 02/16/2015 10:56 AM, Sarunas Kalade wrote:
> Hello lovely people,
> 
> 
> I'm trying to recreate the FIR filter example based on the Zynq GNU Radio 
> wiki: 
> http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq.<http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq>
>  I've downloaded the prebuilt filesystem and managed to run GNU Radio with an 
> RTL-SDR dongle, there were some issues with the QT and WX GUIs (QT was 
> complaining about not finding some pyqt4 libraries, WX didn't exist in GRC - 
> not sure if anyone else had similar issues), so I just used the TCP blocks to 
> actually view the output, which all worked quite nicely. I've had some 
> moderate success using Philip Balister's meta-sdr layer on a qemux86 machine 
> and on a Zedboard, but then again - no kernel module for the FPGA.

WX is built for embedded builds. In general, I suggest running grc on a
desktop and moving the flow graph over.

> 
> 
> My problem right now is that the prebuilt file systems in 
> http://gnuradio.org/data/sdk/zedboard_armv7a-sf-vfp-neon/ don't seem to have 
> the user_peripheral kernel module to communicate with the FPGA. Is it 
> supposed to be in there and I don't know where to look? Am I supposed to 
> cross-compile it on my host machine?
> 

The kernel module is custom work so you would need to add it to the
system yourself.


> 
> I tried to 'make' it inside Zynq, which didn't work because it couldn't find 
> the Kernel source headers (which as far as I'm aware should be located 
> somewhere in /usr/src/)
> 

Let me take a look at adding a package to the default images that would
let you build kernel modules on the zynq. I think some people did some
work recently to make that work.

> 
> I also tried to bitbake the entire thing, which I haven't really had success 
> with earlier, by including Jonathon Pendlum's meta-zynq-gnuradio layer 
> (https://github.com/jpendlum/meta-zynq-gnuradio). My bblayers.conf looked 
> something like this:
> 

I'm guessing Jonathon's stuff is suffering from bitrot.

> 
> BBLAYERS ?= " \
>   /home/sarunas/oe-core/meta \
>   /home/sarunas/layers/meta-zynq-gnuradio \
>   /home/sarunas/layers/meta-xilinx \
>   /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-oe \
>   /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-python \
>   /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-networking \
>   /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-filesystems \
>   /home/sarunas/layers/meta-sdr \
>   "
> 
> And the local.conf was taken directly from Jonathon's GitHub page 
> (https://github.com/jpendlum/meta-zynq-gnuradio/blob/master/conf/local.conf.sample).
> 
> 
> I tried bitbaking gnuradio-dev-image, with multiple branch combinations 
> (masters and daisies), but end of the line is - I have no idea what I'm 
> doing. I don't really know how to figure out which branches in particular I 
> should be using for this, thus everything just keeps failing.
> 
> 
> Obviously, I also tried the repo and oe-gnuradio-manifest path which is 
> described in the GNU Radio Zynq wiki, but that doesn't seem to work for me... 
> After doign repo sync I got the following:
> 
> 
> Fetching projects:  22% (2/9)  Fetching project oe-core
> fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/head/master
> fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/head/master
> error: Cannot fetch oe-core
> 
> error: Exited sync due to fetch errors

Interesting. What repo init command did you use? I'd like to sort this out.

Philip


> 
> 
> It fetched meta-xilinx and bitbake OK, but failed at oe-core. Haven't found 
> anything useful in .gitconfig or any other config files. Then again I'm not 
> sure what I'm looking for. Anyways, if anybody has experienced any of these 
> issues, any help would be really appreciated. At the end of the day, I just 
> want to have a working hardware acceleration example to study.
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> Sarunas
> 
> 
> 
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