SDAccel Development Environment Requirements and Setup

The 2019.1 SDAccel™ development environment consists of the SDx™ development environment and command-line tools for Data Center and PCIe®-based accelerator systems. It also includes the Vivado® Design Suite, which is used for programming the target devices.

The Xilinx Runtime (XRT), deployment shell, and development shell are all delivered as separate installable Linux packages for each supported platform. Users who simply wish to install an accelerator card, and deploy applications to run on an accelerator card, should refer to Getting Started with Alveo Data Center Accelerator Cards (UG1301). However, users who want to use the SDAccel development environment for programming, compiling, and debugging accelerated applications, must do a full installation as described in SDAccel Environment Installation.

TIP: The version of the Vivado® tools installed by the SDx™ environment installation is the standard version of the Vivado Design Suite that can be installed as a separate product. If you are using both the SDAccel environment and the Vivado tools, then just install the SDAccel environment.

System Requirements

The SDAccel development environment runs on the Linux operating systems only, and does not support Windows. To install and run on a computer, your system must meet the following minimum requirements:

Table 1. Minimum System Requirements
Component Requirement
Operating System Linux, 64-bit:
  • Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS, 18.04.1 LTS
  • CentOS 7.4, 7.5, 7.6
  • RHEL 7.4, 7.5, 7.6
System Memory 64 GB (80 GB is recommended)
Internet Connection Required for driver, utilities, and demonstration installation
Hard disk space 100 GB

Install Required CentOS/RHEL Packages

For CentOS or RedHat, you must install the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), as well as additional packages. The initial setup commands depend on your operating system. For more information, see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL.
  1. Install EPEL.

    On RedHat:

    1. To enable an additional repository on your system, open a terminal window, and enter the following command: 
      sudo yum-config-manager --enable rhel-7-server-optional-rpms
    2. To install EPEL, enter the following command: 
      sudo yum install -y https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

    On CentOS:

    1. Open a terminal window, and enter the following command: 
      sudo yum install epel-release
  2. To install kernel headers and kernel development packages, run the following two commands:
    $ sudo yum install kernel-headers-`uname -r` 
$ sudo yum install kernel-devel-`uname -r`
    Note: Ensure that uname is surrounded by backticks (`) and not single quotes (').
  3. After step 2 completes, cold reboot your system.
  4. To verify that you have installed all required packages on your machine, use this script: https://github.com/Xilinx/XRT/blob/master/src/runtime_src/tools/scripts/xrtdeps.sh.

Install Required Ubuntu Packages

You do not need to install additional Ubuntu packages. The packages installed by the OS and by the XRT, deployment and development shells, and the SDAccel development environment provide everything the tool needs.