Demo Builds

To get a first impression of ReconOS without fiddling around with the development and build process, we provide prebuilt images for the ZedBoard development board, including two example applications. You can simply download and exctract them to your SD card and have a working ReconOS system. Detailed instructions how to set up your board are provided in the following sections.

Demo Descriptions

Sort Demo

The sort demo is the well known demo application for ReconOS. It sorts a bunch of data by using both hardware and software threads and demonstrates the possible performance benefits from using hardware threads.

The sort demo takes three parameters, the number of hardware threads (1 or 2), the number of software threads and the number of blocks you want to sort. As a result, you get a report of the sorting times.

Matrix Multiplication

The matrix multiplication demo multiplies two matrices with a variable number of software and hardware threads using the Strassen algorithm.

The demo takes three parameters, the number of hardware threads (1 or 2), the number of software threads and the size of the matrices to multiply (256, 512 , 1024 or 2048).

ZedBoard

SD Card and Board Setup

After downloading the boot files, extract them to the SD card shipped with your ZedBoard. Then insert the SD card into the ZedBoard slot on the right and adjust Jumpers MIO2 to MIO6 to the follwing configuration:

Jumper Function Setting
MIO2 JTAG Mode (Cascaded, Independent) GND
MIO3 Boot Device (JTAG, Quad-SPI, SD Card GND
MIO4 Boot Device (JTAG, Quad-SPI, SD Card 3V3
MIO5 Boot Device (JTAG, Quad-SPI, SD Card 3V3
MIO6 PLL Mode GND

If not already done, connect the UART to your PC, turn the board on and connect via a terminal emulator to your board using a baud rate of 115200, for example using picocom:

> picocom /dev/ttyACM0 -b 115200

A u-boot prompt will appear. From here start the kernel boot process.

Zynq > boot

A couple seconds later the Linux kernel will great you with a new prompt. Mount the SD card, change directories and start playing with the demos. For that, first load the bitstream from SD card to the FPGA, then run the ReconOS init script and finally the demo application.

/ # mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
/ # cd /opt/reconos
/opt/reconos # cat /mnt/bitstream_sortdemo.bit > /dev/xdevcfg
/opt/reconos # ./reconos_init.sh
/opt/reconos # ./sortdemo 2 2 32

Or for the matrix multiplication demo run.

/opt/reconos # cat /mnt/bitstream_matrixmul.bit > /dev/xdevcfg
/opt/reconos # ./reconos_init.sh
/opt/reconos # ./matrixmul 2 2 512

Resources