[Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio on Zynq - trouble getting the user_peripheral kernel module to work

[Sarunas Kalade]

Hello lovely people,

I'm trying to recreate the FIR filter example based on the Zynq GNU Radio wiki: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Zynq. I've downloaded the prebuilt filesystem and managed to run GNU Radio with an RTL-SDR dongle, there were some issues with the QT and WX GUIs (QT was complaining about not finding some pyqt4 libraries, WX didn't exist in GRC - not sure if anyone else had similar issues), so I just used the TCP blocks to actually view the output, which all worked quite nicely. I've had some moderate success using Philip Balister's meta-sdr layer on a qemux86 machine and on a Zedboard, but then again - no kernel module for the FPGA.

My problem right now is that the prebuilt file systems in http://gnuradio.org/data/sdk/zedboard_armv7a-sf-vfp-neon/ don't seem to have the user_peripheral kernel module to communicate with the FPGA. Is it supposed to be in there and I don't know where to look? Am I supposed to cross-compile it on my host machine?

I tried to 'make' it inside Zynq, which didn't work because it couldn't find the Kernel source headers (which as far as I'm aware should be located somewhere in /usr/src/)

I also tried to bitbake the entire thing, which I haven't really had success with earlier, by including Jonathon Pendlum's meta-zynq-gnuradio layer (https://github.com/jpendlum/meta-zynq-gnuradio). My bblayers.conf looked something like this:

BBLAYERS ?= " \
  /home/sarunas/oe-core/meta \
  /home/sarunas/layers/meta-zynq-gnuradio \
  /home/sarunas/layers/meta-xilinx \
  /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-oe \
  /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-python \
  /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-networking \
  /home/sarunas/layers/meta-oe/meta-filesystems \
  /home/sarunas/layers/meta-sdr \
  "

And the local.conf was taken directly from Jonathon's GitHub page (https://github.com/jpendlum/meta-zynq-gnuradio/blob/master/conf/local.conf.sample).

I tried bitbaking gnuradio-dev-image, with multiple branch combinations (masters and daisies), but end of the line is - I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't really know how to figure out which branches in particular I should be using for this, thus everything just keeps failing.

Obviously, I also tried the repo and oe-gnuradio-manifest path which is described in the GNU Radio Zynq wiki, but that doesn't seem to work for me... After doign repo sync I got the following:

Fetching projects:  22% (2/9)  Fetching project oe-core
fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/head/master
fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/head/master
error: Cannot fetch oe-core

error: Exited sync due to fetch errors

It fetched meta-xilinx and bitbake OK, but failed at oe-core. Haven't found anything useful in .gitconfig or any other config files. Then again I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Anyways, if anybody has experienced any of these issues, any help would be really appreciated. At the end of the day, I just want to have a working hardware acceleration example to study.

Thanks!

Sarunas