I’ve been struggling for over a week now to get my DE10-Nano board to boot a minimum Linux kernel with no dependencies to the onboard SD Card.
This post is how to get an embedded initial RAM disk or initramfs to boot and provide minimum application services.
Here’s my embedded “INITRD – How-To Guide”
This post talks about HyperRAM, what it is, how to interface to it and how to improve the performance of high-speed parallel interfaces.
HyperRAM is described well by Cypress. It is essentially a double data rate RAM with a compact 12-line interface that masks the underlying technology of a DDR SDRAM. It can provide 333MB/s of data transfer in short bursts. Data is transferred on both edges of the clock, and the narrow bus makes it ideal for microprocessors or pin-constrained FPGAs. Continue reading
Tented Vias – who’d have thought they play such an essential role? If you have no idea what tented vias are, then you’re not alone and I’m here to enlighten you.
Sadly, this is not a post documenting success, but another important lessons learned. I mentioned in a previous post that I had tired of my custom hardware failing every time I try to solder the next component to the mainboard, so I opted to work on a development board until most of the RTL was proven, and only then move back to custom hardware. I tried the Cyclone V GX Starter kit, but this was lacking a few features like the USB controller I wanted, and was simply too big. I rapidly switched to the fantastic Terasic DE10-Nano SOC. It had a serial interface, the same ADV7513 video chip as my custom board, SDCard and the same USB PHY. All I needed to add was some memory. The DE10-Nano has two expansion ports, so it’s easy to add a daughter board that provides this memory capability:
Another update and another dead end. In an attempt to add the much-needed storage mentioned in my last post, I managed to damage the board so that the JTAG connection stopped working. I added the EPCQ configuration flash chip to the board, only to find that I’d wired the data in and data out back to front and the flash can’t be read from the FPGA. I looked at direct access through the ASMI connection, but I couldn’t get this working. I guess it doesn’t expect the chip to be wired in ‘backwards’! In a futile recovery attempt, I tried to solder in the spare 16G eMMC card, but managed to short out the power pins again. Upon desoldering the eMMC, I must have damaged something because the JTAG connection stopped working. The chip could still be programmed through the supervisor connection on the fast-passive-parallel port, so it was not extensively damaged, but the JTAG connection was pretty essential to efficient RTL development. For now the board is relegated to the ‘post-project-review’ bin. Developing the hardware, RTL and software all in parallel creates too much inefficiency. So I decided to use this board to finish the development, the Terasic Cyclone V GX Starter:
Time for a quick update. I’ve integrated the SDRAM controller, the byte cache, and created some logic to map some of the SDRAM address space to the CPC ROM enable line. I also created some logic to allow the support CPU to push data into the SDRAM. This means that the support CPU can alter the ROM configuration of the CPC2 based on a user-set configuration.
To test the set-up, I created an example ROM that when booted by the CPC, it copies itself to address 0x4000, then dumps 64 bytes of memory at 0x4000. This will test the SDRAM controller, the cache and the cache replacement algorithm. Here’s the output.
Following a summary of the timing closure challenges in my last post, here’s a few more lessons learned from the process of trying to get my SDRAM and DMA controller to run at their fastest possible speed.
A lot of my timing closure process involved changing the RTL code and checking the effect on the timing. It’s a slow and laborious process, so here’s a list of my findings so you can save the hours of compilation time that it took me to test these.
Hello CPC fans! Has it really been 4 months since my last post? How time flies. Thanks to codepainters for the prompt to get going on my next post, and for reminding me that there are readers following the progress of this project.
I spent the first 3 months of this year refining the caching SDRAM controller and chasing timing closure issues. The SDRAM controller and it’s byte cache worked absolutely fine in simulation but failed to work reliably when I put the design in silicon at high speed. The sort of random and unpredictable behaviour I saw is usually indicative of timing issues, (especially when it worked at lower speeds), so I turned my attention to the timing reports from Quartus. This was new ground for me. I knew that IO timing was something that I should pay attention to, but until today my designs generally ran at sub 50MHz speeds where there’s enough timing slack to not notice the issues. However, on every design I’ve ever produced, at least one or two of the Timequest reports were in red, meaning that there were timing violations and hidden problems waiting to rear up when I least wanted them to. Continue reading
Wake-on-LAN is a great tool and allows your home PC to seem almost cloud-like. You can switch on your PC without needing to touch it, and have it available when you need it without it using power constantly.
However, there are some drawbacks. It won’t work from a cold-start, that is the first time you power cycle the PC. On some motherboards, it won’t work if you issue a shutdown command, and Windows and Linux can operate differently, even on the same motherboard. It does seem to work well for the suspend modes (S1-S3), but then you’re consuming more power than an S5 soft-off state. Of course, if you suspend and then lose AC power not only can you not restart, it may also corrupt your system.
Then, of course, it’s called wake-on-LAN, not sleep-on-LAN, so there’s no way to turn it off again. “Ah-ha”, you might say, “log on remotely and issue a shutdown command”.
That’s all possible if your machine hasn’t crashed or frozen, with a kernel panic or just the old-fashioned BSOD. What about a simple reset? These things are taken for granted when you’re physically near the machine.
After years of struggling with variable levels of success with W-O-L, I decided to fix the problem by fitting a second PC inside my home computer. It’s not as silly as it sounds, because of the internet-of-things and the truly amazing work of the Raspberry Pi foundation.
Back-ups are one of those things that everyone knows that they need, but seldom puts much time or effort into setting up and maintaining properly. My previous safety net was CrashPlan, who are exiting from the consumer back up space. This left me in a difficult place to try and find a cloud provider that supports large server backups from Linux at a consumer price.
I looked at Amazon Cloud Storage ($60 per TB per year), Google ($240 per TB per year), and Backblaze B2 at $60 per TB per year (I didn’t consider Azure, given my Linux infrastructure). While Amazon may seem a safer bet on the surface, I found their EC2 pricing unnecessarily confusing, not transparent, and potentially a “runaway” cost as everything has a price per unit. This led me to believe the consumer cloud pricing may just be a transient offer in their quest for per-byte/second billing of computing, storage and networking cloud services. I needed something that had been around for a while, had simple pricing and a focused offering. Backblaze B2 fits those criteria. Continue reading
Well, as promised in my last CPC2 post, I finished the next build of the CPC2 board and learned a lot of things during the process. Somethings worked, some things didn’t, but every build is giving me a wealth of knowledge of product design, fault diagnosis and rectification work. Yes, de-solder braid really was my best friend in this build!
Intelligent Toasters 