Digilent Embedded Linux - Manual

Embedded Linux
Development Guide
Revision:
January 14, 2013
1300 NE Henley Court, Suite 3
Pullman, WA 99163
(509) 334 6306 Voice | (509) 334 6300 Fax
page 1 of 23
Copyright Digilent, Inc. All rights reserved. Other product and company names mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners.
This Embedded Linux Development Guide will provide some preliminary knowledge on how to build
Linux for Digilent boards based on the Zynq-7000
TM
All-Programmable System-on-Chip (ZYNQ AP
SoC) to suit your customized hardware designs. This guide takes a bottom-up approach by starting
from a hardware design on the ZYNQ AP SoC Board, moving through the necessary preliminary
processes, and eventually giving instructions for running and debugging the Linux kernel.
Section I: Hardware Customization begins with the Linux Hardware Design Package for ZYNQ AP
SoC boards, available on the Digilent Inc. website. This section then illustrates the ZYNQ AP SoC
basic architecture and explains how to create customized hardware using Xilinx Platform Studio (XPS)
available in the Xilinx ISE Design Suite WebPack.
Section II: Device Tree
– Describe Your Hardware to the Linux Kernel examines how the Linux
kernel gathers information about the customized hardware. Section II takes a closer look at a data
structure called the Device Tree Blob (DTB), explains how to write a Device Tree Source (DTS) file,
and how to compile the source into a DTB file.
Section III: U-Boot
– The Embedded Boot Loader introduces U-Boot, a popular boot loader for
Linux used by many embedded systems. Section III presents preliminary knowledge about how to
configure and build U-Boot, and provides an introduction of some commonly used U-Boot commands.
After explaining all the prerequisites for running The Linux kernel (boot loaders, device trees, etc.), the
guide moves to configuring the Linux kernel in Section IV: Linux Kernel Configuration. This section
demonstrates customizable features useful for custom hardware design. This section also provides
information for building and customizing the kernel, file system customization, and finally running the
Linux kernel on ZYNQ AP SoC based boards.
During the compilation and running of The Linux kernel on your customized hardware, there is a
chance that the kernel will panic and generate an Oops message or completely cease functioning.
The Appendix: How to Debug the Linux Kernel introduces you to some simple debugging
techniques to follow when errors occur with the Linux kernel.
Before creating custom hardware or using the Linux kernel, Digilent Inc. recommends that users have
some experience with embedded Linux development on other embedded systems or they have read
the Getting Started with Embedded Linux guide for their platform. Moreover, users can read this
documentation along with the Embedded Linux Hands-on Tutorial for their specific Zynq AP SoC
board. These documents are available on the Digilent Website, Embedded Linux page and the
webpage for your product.