Integrating eFPGA with ChibiOS

[Eric12368]

I am currently working on a project that involves integrating an embedded FPGA (eFPGA) with ChibiOS. I have a few questions regarding the best practices and possible challenges I might face during this integration.

Driver Development: What are the key considerations when developing drivers for eFPGA within the ChibiOS environment? Are there any existing examples or libraries that could help?

Resource Management: How can I efficiently manage the resources between the eFPGA and the microcontroller running ChibiOS? Any tips on memory allocation and timing synchronization would be greatly appreciated.

Performance Optimization: What strategies should I adopt to ensure optimal performance of the eFPGA when interfacing with ChibiOS? Are there specific configurations or settings in ChibiOS that I should be aware of?

Debugging and Testing: Could you recommend any tools or methodologies for debugging and testing the integration of eFPGA with ChibiOS? How can I ensure reliability and robustness in my implementation?

Thank you in advance for your insights and suggestions!

[Giovanni]

Hi,

Basically you are running code with an FPGA attached, ChibiOS or not ChibiOS the problem is the same,

Some ChibiOS-specific recommendations:

1) You may consider encapsulating drivers for your FPGA HW into HAL drivers, assuming your HW fits into the model of one for the HAL drivers. If not then you need to create a custom driver but you could still take inspiration from HAL.

2) ChibiOS provides 3 allocation schemes: allocate-only, pools, heaps. I recommend you look into pools 1st which allocates/frees fixed-size objects, it is the one with least problems in a realtime application.

3) Generic RTOS programming, don't do "busy waiting" anywhere, everything interrupt-driven, leverage DMAs where applicable, split it in tasks but don't overdo it.

4) ChibiOS provides a lot of support for debug and tracing, start from this guide: http://www.chibios.org/dokuwiki/doku.ph ... ebug_guide

Additionally, also look at http://www.playembedded.org lots of ChibiOS resources there.

Giovanni