Prepare the environment
lowRISC tools and source code are robust between versions of Linux, but it has been found that Vivado (the Xilinx FPGA implementation suite) is particular about the O/S
All builds were completed with Vivado 2018.1. This was the newest version at the time of writing. We have not tried every version but 2015.4 used on the previous releases does not work due to unidentified synthesis bugs in the virtual memory behaviour. It is not known whether our previous releases can work with the latest tool installation.
For this version of Vivado the Xilinx recommended O/S 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS.
It has been found that most of the problems with Vivado will go away if LD_LIBRARY_PATH is unset after sourcing the Vivado setup. This is caused by obsolete versions of system libraries such as libstc++ being incorporated into Vivado to make it more “portable”. Do not succumb to the temptation to update the system libraries inside Vivado because some of the APIs have changed.
If your machine cannot meet these requirements then synthesis should be able to run, albeit rather slowly, inside a virtual machine. The pre-build binary images were created with Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS.
You should have installed the prerequisites on the download page. If not do so now: Download the source code
Next steps
To set the correct environment variables for running lowRISC, you need to
source the script set_env.sh in the base directory.
This must be done in a fresh shell window, not one used to work on any other branch of LowRISC:
source set_env.sh
It is possible to override the default values by exporting variables before sourcing the script. The following variables are overridable:
$TOP Path to the lowrisc-chip directory ($PWD).
$RISCV Path to the riscv toolchain ($TOP/riscv).
$FPGA_BOARD The target FPGA board (nexys4_ddr).
System on chip debug
The built-in hardware Open SystemOnChip Debug trace debugger from previous releases is not yet available. Some of its functionality (for example loading programs) is available from the GDB/openocd combination.