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

[mlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi John,

THank you very much for your advice. However, I am not using any OS  in my
design. I just want to simply store one partial bitstream into OPB BRAM,
and Microblaze will grab that bitstream and use OPB_HWICAP to partial
reconfigure a part of the FPGA.

So my goal is to generate a full-bitstream that has this one partial
bitstream stored in BRAM blocks. I know that DATA2BRAM tool can update the
BRAM content in a .bit file and produce a new .bit file. But my
understanding is that it can only write .elf file (program executable)
into the BRAM. Is there anyway to load this partial .bit file into the
BRAM Blocks (the full .bit file)?

Or can I use the ASCII version of the .bit file (.rbd) and load this as
.mem text data file?

Thanks for any replies and suggestions.

> 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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