Re: [partial-reconfig] Newbie Question on ICAP & .bit file

[John Williams <jwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Peter,

mlee@ee.ryerson.ca wrote:

> Please accept my apology for asking this newbie question, which I can't
> seem to find an answer to.

No need to apologise - questions are what this list is all about! :)

> I would like to use ICAP and Microblaze to partial reconfigure part of the
> FPGA using the stored bitstream in the BRAM. From my understanding, ICAP
> can only grab bitstreams from BRAM. My question is, how to load the
> generated partial .bit files into BRAM? With the Data2BRAM command?

If you are using microblaze, I'd recommend you use Xilinx's OPB_HWICAP 
core - it interfaces ICAP directly to the OPB bus, making it almost 
trivial to reconfigure partial bitstreams under CPU control.  OPB_HWICAP 
is a standard EDK core (or was in EDK6.x series, haven't looked in 7.1)

As for getting the bitstream into memory in the first place, it really 
depends on your system and what you are trying to do.  If you are using 
the xilkernel, you could use the xilfs (file system library) and create 
a memory-based filesystem that gets copied into the .bit file at build 
time - check the doco on that one.

In my experiments on this I was using uClinux as the OS, so was pulling 
partial bitstreams across the network, or from a flash filesystem - but 
that might be overkill for your application.

Hope this helps,

John
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