Installation

Installation Requirements

The Vitis™ software platform consists of an integrated design environment (IDE) for interactive project development, and command-line tools for scripted or manual application development. The Vitis software platform also includes the Vivado® Design Suite for implementing the kernel on the target device, and for developing custom hardware platforms.

Some requirements listed here are only required for software acceleration features, but not for embedded software development features. Xilinx recommends installing all the required packages to have the best experience with the Vitis software platform.

To install and run on a computer, your system must meet the following minimum requirements.

Note: Support for the following operating systems will end in 2021.2 for the application acceleration development flow:

RHEL/CentOS 7.6, 7.7
Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS, 16.04.6 LTS
Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, 18.04.2 LTS, 18.04.3 LTS

Note: The application acceleration development flow is not supported by the Windows OS.

Table 1. Application Acceleration Development Flow Minimum System Requirements
Component	Requirement
Component	Development (Build Machine OS)	Deployment (Host OS) Enabled via XRT
Operating System	Linux, 64-bit: CentOS/RHEL 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 8.1, 8.2 RHEL 8.3 Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS, 16.04.6 LTS, 18.04.1 LTS, 18.04.2 LTS, 18.04.3 LTS, 18.04.4 LTS, 18.04.5 LTS, 20.04 LTS, 20.04.1 LTS Amazon Linux 2 AL2 LTS	For on-premise acceleration (Alveo Data Center accelerator cards): CentOS/RHEL 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 8.1, 8.2 RHEL 8.3 Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS, 16.04.6 LTS, 18.04.1 LTS, 18.04.2 LTS, 18.04.3 LTS, 18.04.4 LTS, 18.04.5 LTS, 20.04 LTS, 20.04.1 LTS Amazon Linux 2 AL2 LTS
Operating System		For edge acceleration (embedded platforms): PetaLinux 2021.1
System Memory	For Alveo cards: 64 GB (80 GB is recommended) For embedded: 32 GB
Internet Connection	Required for downloading drivers and utilities.
Hard disk space	100 GB

Table 2. AI Engine Development Flow Minimum System Requirements
Component	Requirement
Operating System	Linux, 64-bit: CentOS/RHEL 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 8.1, 8.2 RHEL 8.3 Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS,16.04.6 LTS, 18.04.1 LTS, 18.04.2 LTS, 18.04.3 LTS, 18.04.4 LTS, 18.04.5 LTS, 20.04 LTS, 20.04.1 LTS
System Memory	64 GB (80 GB is recommended)
Internet Connection	Required for downloading drivers and utilities.
Hard disk space	100 GB

OpenCL Installable Client Driver Loader

The Vitis™ environment supports the OpenCL Installable Client Driver (ICD) extension (cl_khr_icd). This extension allows multiple implementations of OpenCL to co-exist on the same system. The ICD Loader acts as a supervisor for all installed platforms, and provides a standard handler for all API calls.

Applications can choose an OpenCL platform from the list of installed platforms. Based on the platform ID specified by the application, the ICD dispatches the OpenCL host calls to the right runtime.

TIP: This is an optional package to install if your system has or uses multiple versions of the OpenCL library.

Xilinx does not provide the OpenCL ICD library, so the following should be used to install the library on your system.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu the ICD library is packaged with the distribution. Install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install ocl-icd-libopencl1
sudo apt-get install opencl-headers
sudo apt-get install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

RHEL/CentOS

For RHEL/CentOS use EPEL to install the following packages:

sudo yum install ocl-icd
sudo yum install ocl-icd-devel
sudo yum install opencl-headers

Note: Refer to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL for information on installing EPEL if needed.

Vitis Software Platform Installation

Installing the Vitis Software Platform

Ensure your system meets all requirements described in Installation Requirements.

TIP: To reduce installation time, disable anti-virus software and close all open programs that are not needed.

Go to the Xilinx Downloads Website.
Download the installer for your operating system.
Run the installer, which opens the Welcome page of the Xilinx Unified 2021.1 Installer.
Click Next to open the Select Install Type page of the Installer.
Enter your Xilinx user account credentials, and then select Download and Install Now.
Click Next to open the Accept License Agreements page of the Installer.
Accept the terms and conditions by clicking each I Agree check box.
Click Next to open the Select Product to Install page of the Installer.
Select Vitis and click Next to open the Vitis Unified Software Platform page of the Installer.
Customize your installation by selecting design tools and devices (optional).
IMPORTANT: Do not deselect the following option. It is required for installation.
- Devices > Install devices for Alveo and Xilinx Edge acceleration platforms
Note: Both the Vitis tools and Vivado Design Suite are installed as part of the Vitis Unified Software Platform. You do not need to separately install Vivado tools. You can also install System Generator and Model Composer if needed.
Click Next to open the Select Destination Directory page of the Installer
Specify the installation directory, review the location summary, review the disk space required to insure there is enough space, and click Next to open the Installation Summary page of the Installer.
Click Install to begin the installation of the software.

IMPORTANT: Do not deselect the following option. It is required for installation.

Devices > Install devices for Alveo and Xilinx Edge acceleration platforms

Note: Both the Vitis tools and Vivado Design Suite are installed as part of the Vitis Unified Software Platform. You do not need to separately install Vivado tools. You can also install System Generator and Model Composer if needed.

After a successful installation of the Vitis software, a confirmation message is displayed, with a prompt to run the installLibs.sh script.

Locate the script at: <install_dir>/Vitis/<release>/scripts/installLibs.sh, where <install_dir> is the location of your installation, and <release> is the installation version.

Note: This script is not required on Windows.
Run the script using sudo privileges as follows:
```
sudo installLibs.sh
```

The command installs a number of necessary packages for the Vitis tools based on the OS of your system.

IMPORTANT: Pay attention to any messages returned by the script. You might need to install any missing packages manually.

Installing Xilinx Runtime and Platforms

Xilinx Runtime (XRT) is implemented as a combination of user-space and kernel driver components. XRT supports Alveo PCIe-based cards, as well as Versal and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC-based embedded system platforms, and provides a software interface to Xilinx programmable logic devices.

You must install XRT for use in the Vitis application acceleration development flow. You do not need to reinstall it for every additional platform you choose to download.

Note: Installing XRT is not required when targeting Arm®-based embedded platforms: Vitis compiler has its own copy of xclbinutil for hardware generation, and for software compilation, you can use the XRT from the sysroot. Look for Common images for Embedded Vitis platforms on the downloads page.

IMPORTANT: XRT installation uses standard Linux RPM and Linux DEB distribution files, and root access is required for all software and firmware installations.

<rpm-dir> or <deb-dir> is the directory where you downloaded the packages to install.

To download and install the XRT package for your operating system, do the following.

Go to https://www.xilinx.com/xrt.
From the Getting Started page, you can choose to download the XRT package for a specific Alveo Data Center accelerator card, or for Embedded Platforms. After choosing the platform, you will be redirected to a website with instructions for downloading XRT and the required files for the selected platform.
Follow the directions to install XRT and your selected platform.
TIP: The instructions for installing the Alveo Data Center accelerator cards are provided on the platform download page. Instructions for installing the Embedded Platforms can be found in the following section.

Installing Embedded Platforms

Embedded platforms are available to download from the Vitis Embedded Platforms download page for use in the Vitis unified software platform. For the Vitis embedded software development flow, you can use embedded platforms with Linux, standalone/bare metal, or RTOS domains. To support the Vitis application acceleration development flow, embedded platforms must run Linux, with XRT integrated into the rootfs. A complete list of the supported platforms can be found on the downloads page.

To install a platform, download the zip file and extract it into /opt/xilinx/platforms, or extract it into a separate location and add that location to the PLATFORM_REPO_PATHS environment variable.

Embedded platforms require a sysroot to cross-compile the host application for the Vitis application acceleration flow. Look for the Common images for Embedded Vitis platforms block on the downloads page, and download and extract the common image for your platform architecture.

Running sdk.sh extracts and installs the sysroot. The option -dgives you the option to choose where to install the sysroot. This package also provides a pre-compiled kernel image and rootfs.

You can add the sysroot to a Makefile for your command line project, or the Vitis IDE will prompt you to add it to your application project. For example, in your Makefile point <SYSROOT> to /<install_path>/aarch64-xilinx-linux, which is generated when running sdk.sh.

Setting Up the Environment to Run the Vitis Software Platform

To configure the environment to run the Vitis software platform, run the following scripts in a command shell to set up the tools to run in that shell:

#set up XILINX_VITIS and XILINX_VIVADO variables 
source <Vitis_install_path>/Vitis/2021.1/settings64.sh
#set up XILINX_XRT for data center platforms (not required for embedded platforms)
source /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh

TIP: .csh scripts are also provided.

This sets up the tools for the Vitis application acceleration development flow, the Vitis embedded software development flow, and the AI Engine tools for development on Versal AI Engine devices.

To use any platforms you have downloaded as described in Installing Xilinx Runtime and Platforms, set the following environment variable to point to the location of the platforms:

export PLATFORM_REPO_PATHS=<path to platforms>

This identifies the location of platform files for the tools, and makes them accessible to your design projects.