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Environment Setup

FPGA rebuilds and the driver, kernel, and software builds all run on the same host toolchain. Set it up once, then follow the workflow you need:

Each workflow has a few extras of its own, such as the FPGA's Viterbi license.

For the exact toolchain, kernel, and image versions these builds expect, see Versions this wiki targets.

Xilinx toolchain (Vivado + Vitis)

  • Vivado 2022.2 with Vitis installed (you need .../Vitis, not Vitis_HLS). If Vitis is missing, add it via Xilinx Design Tools → Add Design Tools for Devices 2022.2.
  • The driver is cross-compiled with the kernel toolchain, so a Vivado/Vitis install is required for both driver and FPGA builds.
  • The installer download is tens of GB and requires a free AMD/Xilinx account from the Xilinx website.

Which Vivado version?

The software side of openwifi historically referenced Vivado 2021.1, while the current openwifi-hw build targets 2022.2. Match the version the repo README states at the time you build.

Host OS and packages

  • Ubuntu 18.04/20.04/22.04 LTS are the tested versions. Ubuntu 24.04 is untested but works with the libtinfo5 workaround below.
  • libtinfo5 for Vivado. On Ubuntu 24.04 the default libtinfo6 won't do, so install libtinfo5 manually:
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/n/ncurses/libtinfo5_6.1-1ubuntu1.18.04.1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i ./libtinfo5_6.1-1ubuntu1.18.04.1_amd64.deb

sudo apt install flex bison libssl-dev device-tree-compiler u-boot-tools -y

Environment variables

Most host-side build steps expect these (use absolute paths):

export XILINX_DIR=/opt/Xilinx                 # dir containing Vitis/, Vivado/, etc.  (all builds)
export BOARD_NAME=zed_fmcs2                    # your board                            (all builds)
export OPENWIFI_HW_IMG_DIR=/path/to/openwifi-hw-img  # FPGA image + full SD-image builds
export ARCH_BIT=32                             # 32 for Zynq-7000, 64 for Zynq UltraScale+ (e.g. ZCU102)  (software builds)