Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Michael Davidsaver <[email protected]> · Wed, 6 Jul 2016 08:36:24 -0400

On 07/05/2016 10:25 AM, Konrad, Martin wrote:
> Hi Han,
>> - Which kernel modules sources should I use?  mrf? or mrfioc2?
> mrf for updating firmware following MRF's instructions. mrfioc2 for
> running IOCs using the mrfioc2 device support.

My original plan was to support firmware loading through the kernel
module of mrfioc2.  However, this has not been very successful.  At
present only updating the PMC-EVR-230 has been verified.

Partly this is my doing as I decided to depend on the urjtag project as
an open jtag programmer implementation.  Unfortunately this project
stopped making releases in 2009.  There is some development going on and
it continues to work, but none of this work is packaged, so you would
have to build from VCS source (git://git.code.sf.net/p/urjtag/git).

I mention this as the cPCI-EVG-230 uses the same mechanism as the
PMC-EVR-230 for loading the bit file (JTAG via. GPIO pins on the PLX
bridge chip).  So it shouldn't be hard to test loading for this card. 
Reading the jtag IDs is non-invasive (urjtag 'detect' command).

FYI. firmware loading for newer PCI cards with a soft PCI bridge will
probably never be supported through the mrfioc2 kernel module.  In this
case loading requires the FPGA to be correctly configured.  So a failed
load can't be corrected via. PCI, but requires recourse to external
jtag.  This complicates development of the loading process.

>
>> ...
>> - Are there any documents which I can look at?
> Run make in [3]. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any other documentation
> regarding mrfioc2.

I publish the results on sourceforge

http://epics.sourceforge.net/mrfioc2/

http://epics.sourceforge.net/mrfioc2/evr-usage.pdf

Firmware update is discussed in section 7 of the EVR software manual.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System