bootstrapping startup

[forensicgarlic]

Trying to bootstrap startup on a new machine from the readme.md is tough. Here's some questions I had looking through subdirectories.

What Xilinx tools do we need installed?
What platforms do the tools work on?
It looks like you're using sds++ in some of your Makefiles, where should someone get that compiler from?
Do you expect all the .tcl scripts to run with vivado_hls <script>.tcl
hls/utils/x_hls_utils.h is included in a few files, but doesn't appear to be at a consistent location at different . releases of vivado. 2018.3 seems to have it under just utils instead of hls/utils.

[stephenneuendorffer]

Sorry, we have assumed that users are going to have some experience with the Xilinx tools, so there's not really a step-by-step experience here. These libraries are intended to be used with Vivado HLS. Vivado HLS generates an IP block that needs to be integrated into an FPGA design. The repository doesn't include any FPGA designs, however. As such there's not really a 'platform': it's intended to be user-provided. I've focused on 10Gb designs running on a ZCU102 development board using this application note: https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/application_notes/xapp1305-ps-pl-based-ethernet-solution.pdf. I've also experimented with SDSoc (the sds++ tool) to integrate with the Pynq platform, but the overall performance isn't terribly high.

Lastly, yes, the x_hls_utils.h file has moved in recent versions.

[forensicgarlic]

with respect to platform, I meant more along the lines of the development system details -- something like "On my <Debian/Windows> system with vivado hls version 201X.Y installed, running the tcl scripts (via vivado_hls <script_name>.tcl) in each app subdirectory should build and test the apps. Other versions of Vivado HLS are expected to work as well, though you may need to tweak the includes in the source files to point to the current location of some .h files. If you have the SDSoc tools installed and on your PATH, running Make in each subdirectory will also work" or something along those lines.

I'm mostly looking for a little guidance on where this will definitely work, vs where the system I'm trying it on might require some sort of tweaks.

[stephenneuendorffer]

I developed using vivado_hls 2018.2. You should be able to run vivado_hls on the .tcl files in the subdirectories to compile the examples. The examples are somewhat different, so the .tcl files aren't 100% consistent. cd apps/arp; vivado_hls arp.tcl is a good place to start: it's probably the most useful standalone example.