Running Zephyr on LiteX/VexRiscv on Avalanche board with Microsemi PolarFire FPGA

This section contains a tutorial on how to build and run a shell sample for the Zephyr RTOS on the LiteX soft SoC with an RV32 VexRiscv CPU on the Future Electronics Avalanche Board with a PolarFire FPGA from Microsemi (a Microchip company) as well as in the Renode open source simulation framework.

_images/avalanche.jpg — Fig. 2 The Future Electronics Avalanche board - top.

Building your system

Zephyr

First, prepare your environment and get the Zephyr RTOS sources.

If you want to skip building Zephyr manually, you can download a precompiled ELF file and binary file.

Building a shell sample

Generate the project build files:

cd samples/subsys/shell/shell_module
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DBOARD=litex_vexriscv ..

Build it:

make -j $(nproc)

As a result, you should find zephyr.elf and zephyr.bin in the zephyr folder.

Running

Preparing the platform

Loading Zephyr

Running Zephyr

Now you can use the UART window to interact with the shell, e.g.:

uart:~$ help
Please press the <Tab> button to see all available commands.
You can also use the <Tab> button to prompt or auto-complete all commands or its subcommands.
You can try to call commands with <-h> or <--help> parameter for more information.
Shell supports following meta-keys:
Ctrl+a, Ctrl+b, Ctrl+c, Ctrl+d, Ctrl+e, Ctrl+f, Ctrl+k, Ctrl+l, Ctrl+u, Ctrl+w
Alt+b, Alt+f.
Please refer to shell documentation for more details.

uart:~$ kernel version
Zephyr version 1.14.0