Running Emulation Targets - 2021.2 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-03-29
Version
2021.2 English

The emulation targets have their own target specific drivers which are loaded by XRT. Thus, the same CPU binary can be run as-is without recompiling, by just changing the target mode during runtime. Based on the value of the XCL_EMULATION_MODE environment variable, XRT loads the target specific driver and makes the application interface with an emulation model of the hardware. The allowed values of XCL_EMULATION_MODE are sw_emu and hw_emu. If XCL_EMULATION_MODE is not set, then XRT will load the hardware driver.

Important: It is required to set XCL_EMULATION_MODE when running emulation.
Figure 1. XRT Drivers

You can also use the xrt.ini file to configure various options applicable to emulation. There is an [Emulation] specific section in xrt.ini, as described in xrt.ini File.