Vitis Unified Software Platform Overview

The following figure shows the embedded software application development workflow for the Vitis unified software platform.

• Hardware engineers design the logic and export information required by software development from the Vivado® Design Suite to an XSA archive file.
• Software developers import XSA into the Vitis software platform by creating a platform. Platform was heavily used by application acceleration projects. To unify the Vitis workspace architecture for all kinds of applications, software development projects now migrate to platform and application architecture. A platform includes hardware specification and software environment settings.
• The software environment settings are called domains, which are also a part of a platform.
• Software developers create applications based on the platform and domains.
• Applications can be debugged in the Vitis IDE.
• In a complex system, several applications may run at the same time and communicate with each other. So the system level verification needs to be done as well.
• After everything is ready, the Vitis IDE can help to create boot images which initialize the system and launch applications.

There are two project types in Vitis workspace:

Platform Project

A platform project provides hardware information and software runtime environment.

System project

A system project groups together applications that run simultaneously on the device.

Workspace

When you open the Vitis software platform, you create a workspace. A workspace is a directory location used by the Vitis software platform to store project data and metadata. An initial workspace location must be provided when the Vitis software platform is launched.

Platform

The target platform or platform is a combination of hardware components (XSA) and software components (domains/BSPs, boot components such as FSBL, and so on).

Platform Project

A platform project is customizable for adding domains and modifying domain settings. A platform project can be created by importing an XSA, or by importing an existing platform. Platforms in repository are not editable. Only platforms in workspace are called platform projects. Platform projects are editable for creating more domains. Several system projects can be built on the same platform project to share the hardware and software environment settings.

System Project

A system project groups together applications that run simultaneously on the device. Two standalone applications for the same processor cannot sit together in a system project. Two Linux applications can sit together in a system project. A workspace can contain multiple system projects.

Application (Software Project)

A software project contains one or more source files, along with the necessary header files, to allow compilation and generation of a binary output (ELF) file. A system project can contain multiple application projects. Each software project must have a corresponding domain.

XSA

XSAs are exported from the Vivado Design Suite. It has the hardware specifications like processor configuration properties, peripheral connection information, address map, and device initialization code. You have to provide the XSA when creating a platform project.

Domain

A domain is a board support package (BSP) or the operating system (OS) with a collection of software drivers, on which to build your application. The created software image contains only the portions of the Xilinx library you use in your embedded design. You can create multiple applications to run on the domain. A domain is tied to a single processor or a cluster of isomorphic processors (for example: A53_0 or A53) in the platform.

Flow

In the Vitis unified software platform, the workflow for software development and application acceleration share the major parts but they still have slight differences. The Vitis platform has different configurations to support different use cases. Current design flow is defined in these three cases:

Embedded

This platform supports embedded software development for Arm® processors and MicroBlaze™ processors.

Embedded Acceleration

Besides embedded software development, application acceleration is also supported on this type of platform. The platform provides clocks, bus interfaces and interrupt controller for acceleration kernel to use.

Data Center Acceleration

Acceleration kernel and x86 host application can be developed on this platform. Kernel is controlled via PCIe® bus.

The following is an example of a typical Vitis software development workspace for Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC.

• Linux domain can be created for Arm® Cortex™-A53 SMP cluster. Linux applications can be compiled and linked against the libraries provided by the sysroot of Linux domain.
• Arm Cortex-A53 core 0 and Arm Cortex™-R5F core 0 can run hello world application at the same time, these two applications can be grouped into one system project.
• The baremetal Build-in-self-test application on Arm Cortex-A53 core 0 can work in its own system project and have its own BSP settings.
• These system projects run at different time on the MPSoC chip. Applications in one system project run at the same time.
• Boot components like FSBL and PMU firmware can be created in platform project automatically. Boot components have their own BSP settings.