How to run waveform developed in REDHawk IDE in my

Question

I have developed an SCA component HelloWorld using Redhawk IDE on my development PC running Centos6.8. Now I want to run it on my target hardware i.e. Zedboard running Ubuntu embedded Linux OS.

Answer 1

You have two options if you want to use the existing Ubuntu based OS on the Zedboard. You can either build REDHAWK and your component from source on the board which is the easiest option although the slowest, or you could run an emulator on your CentOS6 PC and build within that environment which is a little more complicated but would take less time.

If you decide to build on the device, you should be able to follow the directions for building for Ubuntu on the redhawksdr website. If you choose to build within an emulated environment you could look at some of the arm based docker images on the docker registry (which use qemu under the hood), or use qemu directly.

A third option would be to use an embedded build system like yocto and the redhawk recipes provided by Axios here to build a custom OS with your component but this would replace the Ubuntu based OS you currently have installed. The benefit to this though is that it is portable to multiple hardware platforms and produces a vastly smaller footprint than the Ubuntu OS.

Answer 2

As the previous response mentioned, trying to compile it all natively on the Zedboard or via emulator is certainly one way to go. However the Ubuntu instructions for the latest version of REDHAWK are no longer listed in the documentation. It would also largely depend on what development libraries are available on the ARM side of Ubuntu. It might leave you having to compile something natively that requires a good amount of patching.

As Youssef mentioned, in many ways it is easier to go the Yocto/OE route since you can add in recipes for the various devices and components you want to run locally, on the Zedboard.

We tend to build out from using a Google repo manifest like this one. The README covers the steps, which are also in a demo as well as a follow-on where we switch to the MicroZed as a the next target. Going this route, you'll end up with a build environment for bootstrapping REDHAWK 2.0.4 onto the Zedboard along with many other things.