Running the System - 2020.2 English

Versal ACAP AI Engine Programming Environment User Guide (UG1076)

Document ID
UG1076
Release Date
2020-11-24
Version
2020.2 English

Running the system depends on the build target. The process of running the hardware emulation build is different from running the hardware build.

For the hardware build, copy the contents of the sd_card folder produced by the package process to an actual SD card. That device becomes the boot device for your system. Boot your system and launch your application as designed. To capture event trace data when running the hardware, see Performance Analysis of AI Engine Graph Application. To debug the running hardware, see Debugging the AI Engine Application.

For hardware emulation the --package command generates the launch_hw_emu.sh script as part of the process of packaging the system. You can use this script to launch the emulation environment for the AI Engine application for test and debug purposes. Hardware emulation runs the AI Engine simulator for the graph application, runs the Vivado logic simulator (XSIM) for the PL kernels, and runs QEMU for the PS host application.

Use the following command to launch hardware emulation from the command line:

./launch_hw_emu.sh -graphic-xsim
Note: The -graphic-xsim launches the XSIM window where you can specify what signals from the design you want to view. It does not include internal AI Engine signals. Here, you must press the Run All button in the window to continue execution.

The launch_hw_emu.sh script launches QEMU in system mode, and loads and runs the AI Engine application, running the PL kernels in the Vivado simulator. If the emulation flow completes successfully, at the end of the emulation you should see something like the following:

[LAUNCH_EMULATOR] INFO: 09:44:09 : PS-QEMU exited
[LAUNCH_EMULATOR] INFO: 09:44:09 : PMU/PMC-QEMU exited
[LAUNCH_EMULATOR] INFO: 09:44:09 : Simulation exited
pmu_path /scratch/aie_test1/hw_emu_pmu.log
pl-sim_dir /scratch/aie_test1/sim/behav_waveform/xsim
Please refer PS /simulate logs at /scratch/aie_test1 for more details.
DONE!
INFO: Emulation ran successfully

When launching hardware emulation, you can specify options for the AI Engine simulator that runs the graph application, The options can be specified from the launch_hw_emu.sh script using the -aie-sim-options as described in Simulator Options for Hardware Emulation.

When the emulation is fully booted and the Linux prompt is up, make sure to set the following environment variable:

export XILINX_XRT=/usr

This will ensure that the host application will work. Note that this also must be done when running on hardware.