Virtex-Linux is a Small linux distro, suitable for use on the embedded powerpc-405 processor of the virtex-II FPGA. The XUP-V2P plataform is initially supported. The goal is to build a debian-like system, or to directly use debian repositories.

History:

New 13/4/2009: I have successfuly compiled 2.6.29 kernel using uartlite, xsysace and emaclite drivers with XPS 10.1 sp3. Instructions are here: http://code.google.com/p/virtex-linux/wiki/LinuxV2

As part of the required courses for my PHD in Computer Science in ITBA (Instituto Tecnologico de Buenos Aires), I spent the second semester of 2007 researching and using the FPGA technology to build custom digital hardware. One of the task that i completed during that period was this small Linux distro, to use it as a little server when I'm not using it in my evil projects (AKA research thesis).

Turns out that the PowerPC 405 that comes with the Virtex II-Pro is not slow at all and can easily run almost all the standard unix applications. I started compiling and installing stuff and made a pretty complete system. It's still based on Busybox but has a lot of real applications on it, like Python, Vim, Bash, qemu, etc. In the beginning I was cross-compiling but once I got GCC native working on the board, things were much easier.

I have putted together this distro following the steps in the BYU Linux on FPGA page:

http://splish.ee.byu.edu/projects/LinuxFPGA/index.htm

You will need a Compact Flash memory of about 512 Megabytes.

Virtex-linux V 0.1 contains:

Syntethized hardware:

• PowerPC 405 300 Mhz (Just one processor used, can't use the other one because the board lacks a cache-coherency circuit)
• 16550 Serial (115200 8n1 default)
• 100 Megabits Ethernet MAC
• System ACE Flash (Up to 4 Gigabytes?, tested with 2 Gigabytes)
• 512 MB DDR Controller (Works with a bigger 1 GB Dimm but only will see 2 banks, 512 MB)

Software:

• Montavista Linux kernel 2.4 for ppc (Free edition)
• BusyBox 1.61 (Fairly complete installation)
• OpenSSH 4.6 (Including sftp-server)
• Bash 3.02
• Tor 0.1.2.17
• OpenSSL 0.98e
• Python 2.5
• Vim 7.2
• Links browser 2.1pre28 (SSL,ZLIB,JavaScript)
• Qemu 0.8.2 (Tested running an i386 OpenBSD 4.3 image, works fine!)
• GCC/G++ 4.02 native (from http://www.kdvelectronics.eu/ml403/ppc405_native_gcc.html)
• A couple of development libraries: zilb,readline, etc.

The final goal is to make this distribution as small as possible, and convert it to use the debian ppc repositories (Hint: The debian etch PowerPC packages work even if the don't support ppc-405, I installed qemu that way)

For pictures, follow this link to my homepage: http://ortegaalfredo.googlepages.com/fpgas

Note: No vga output is included. You must access the system via serial or ssh.

This project is released under the GNU General Public License v2

Copyright 2007-2008 Ortega Alfredo Adrian ortegaalfredo@gmail.com