A platform is the starting point of your Vitis design. Vitis applications are built on top of the platforms.
An embedded platform includes a hardware platform and a software platform.
Hardware Platform
The hardware platform is the static, unchanging portion of your hardware design. It includes the Xilinx Support Archive (XSA) file exported from the Vivado Design Suite.
The hardware platform describes platform hardware setup and the acceleration resources that can be used by acceleration applications, for example, Input and output interfaces, clocks, AXI buses, and interrupts. Vitis adds kernels and infrastructure modules to the hardware design as needed to facilitate data movement. Acceleration kernels can share data with platform IPs, but cannot change or modify them. For information about setting up the hardware platform, refer to Installing Xilinx Runtime and Platforms.
Software Platform
The software platform is the environment that runs the software to control acceleration kernels for acceleration applications. It includes the domain setup and boot components setup.
By default, all Xilinx pre-built platforms have a Linux domain that has enabled Xilinx Runtime (XRT) so that acceleration applications can run on this environment. The pre-built binaries for Linux kernel image and rootfs are located in a separate download file on the PetaLinux download page. See the "Common images for Embedded Vitis platforms" section of the Xilinx download center. Because the device tree is unique to each platform, it is provided as a component with the Linux XRT domain inside the platform.
Linux Domain Components must be provided when there is a Linux domain in the embedded platform. These components can be generated by PetaLinux, Yocto, or third-party frameworks. Because these components can be shared across all Xilinx demo boards for the given FPGA family, a common Linux component image generated by PetaLinux is provided for Zynq-7000 SoC and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC devices.
The following Linux images can be downloaded from the PetaLinux download page:
- Root File System (RFS)
- Includes binaries, libraries, and setups for a Linux file system. In the Xilinx-provided common rootfs, XRT has been installed so that acceleration application can run on this Linux environment.
- Kernel Image
- A compiled Linux kernel. The common kernel image provided by Xilinx includes most Xilinx peripheral drivers.
- Sysroot
- Used for cross compilation. It provides the libraries to be linked when compiling applications for a target system.
Xilinx pre-built embedded platforms and pre-built common Linux
components are provided in separate download files. You can regenerate the common
Linux components from the platform source files hosted on the Vitis Embedded Platform GitHub repository by setting the
environment variable COMMON_RFS_KRNL_SYSROOT=FALSE before running
make .