Monthly Archives: September 2016

Vivado Lab 2016.2 on Arch Linux

Posted by on September 18, 2016 No comments

To bring my Digilent Arty board to life I had to install “Vivado Lab 2016.2”, a software to program Xilinx FPGA’s. Specifically I used to follow the SiFive Freedom U500 Arty FPGA Getting Started Guide. While installing Vivado Lab succeeded, I had some trouble running it on my Arch Linux. The Shortcut did not show anything, but when running it from console I could see the following error:

$ /opt/Xilinx/Vivado_Lab/2016.2/bin/vivado_lab
application-specific initialization failed: couldn't load file "librdi_commontasks.so": libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It turned out that just linking the new ncurses library makes it working

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libncursesw.so /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5

KVM with kvmtool on ARMv7

Posted by on September 5, 2016 No comments

In this third part about KVM on ARMv7 I use kvmtool as the user-space part of the hypervisor. This lightweight hypervisor allowed me to run up to 72 virtual machines…  This does not really serves any purpose other than demonstrating what is possible :-). See the video in the end how that looked like.

In 2011 Pekka Enberg announced kvmtool (native Linux KVM tool). Initially it was meant to live within the Linux kernel source tree, but it ended up in a separate git repository on kernel.og.. In between it has been ported to several architectures too, including ARM and ARM64. Its binary usually goes with the name lkvm. It strictly depends on KVM and is otherwise kept rather lean.

Similar to the previous blog post, I used a host root file system based on Ångströms development image. kvmtool was not yet available in any OpenEmbedded layer, hence I had to write a new recipe (it should turn up in the meta-virtualization layer mailing list soon). Read more »