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Discovery and Evaluation AMD ZynqMP™ device portfolio

Discovery and Evaluation AMD ZynqMP™ device portfolio

This page is a getting started guide providing walk through style examples using the AMD Embedded Development Framework (EDF). It covers initial board setup and running a pre-built disk image. For other personas and tasks, see the relevant page linked from https://xilinx-wiki.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/A/pages/3250585728 .

Table of Contents

Introduction

This section walks a user through the Discovery and Evaluation persona within AMD EDF, which covers initial board setup and exploration using a pre-built image. See other persona pages for on target development, deployment options and custom flows.

 

All Personas: https://xilinx-wiki.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/A/pages/3250585728

Discovery and Evaluation - Booting the board for the first time and exploration

image-20250328-112604.png

How to boot a board using the pre-built Images: SD Boot

Basic board setup - Interfaces and power up

For evaluation board specific interface detail see the following pages, ZCU104 is used as an example below. For other Zynq UltraScale+ boards, use the appropriate board names.

The basic board setup is as follows (A ZCU104 is used as an example below)

  1. Connect the external power supply to the "12V Power" connectors

  2. Connect the USB connector labeled "USB/JTAG UART" interface to the host PC

  3. Connect the RJ45 labeled "Ethernet" to the local network

ZCU104 high level overview

Powering the Board

With the board external power supply connected to an outlet, plug in the external supply to the board and turn the board on with the power switch (A ZCU104 is shown below):

Connections for ZCU104 board

UART connections - FTDI-USB

Evaluation boards have multiple UART connections. When the FTDI-USB cable is plugged in it will create multiple device nodes on the host PC.

For example ZCU104 has 4 serial / UART interfaces mapped as follows:

  • Device 0 (JTAG)

  • Device 1 (PS-UART0)

  • Device 2 (PS-UART1)

  • Device 3 (PL pins, intended to be used as a PL UART)

For Evaluation board specific interface details, see

 

ZCU104 UART - ZCU104 Evaluation boards

Versal PS-UART0 is used by the primary user software (FSBL, U-Boot, and Linux). This can be directly accessed by the host PC via the FTDI UART. 

Versal PS-UART1 is used as a virtual terminal in Linux.

How to boot a board using the pre-built Images : Single stage boot SD mode - Setup

This section is for evaluation boards that support single step boot from SD Card as the default boot mode for pre-built images (ZCU104)

  1. Download the pre-built board specific EDF Linux disk image for SD boot for your Evaluation board, and write the image file to an to SDCARD

  1. After programing the SDCARD move to step https://xilinx-wiki.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/A/pages/3265036298/Discovery+and+Evaluation+AMD+ZynqMP+device+portfolio#Booting-the-Board-to-Linux

Writing the EDF Linux® disk image (wic) to the boot media : SD card

Write the EDF Linux® disk image to the boot media. This is done using the Linux image which is distributed as a WIC and using an off-the-shelf tool written to the physical SD card from a user's PC. 

Minimum SD card size 16GB: AMD EDF disk images require a minimum of a 16GB SD card to work correctly

balenaEtcher : Recent versions have been found to be unreliable when flashing, failing during the verify stage of writing. If you experience this issue, please use an alternative tool.

The .wic.xz file be written to an SD card using either an application such as Raspberry Pi Imager or balenaEtcher or a command line utility such as dd or bmaptool:

image-2024-12-17_15-3-52.png
Using Raspberry Pi imager

bmaptool instructions

On a Linux host computer, we can flash the WIC image to an SD card using bmaptool as follows:

The SD device name can vary! The following example needs to align with the sd* device name enumerated for the target SD card by your host system.

 

$ bmaptool copy edf-linux-disk-image-amd-cortexa53-mali-common.rootfs.wic.xz /dev/sdk bmaptool: info: discovered bmap file 'edf-linux-disk-image-amd-cortexa53-mali-common.rootfs.wic.bmap' bmaptool: info: block map format version 2.0 bmaptool: info: 2359297 blocks of size 4096 (9.0 GiB), mapped 227540 blocks (888.8 MiB or 9.6%) bmaptool: info: copying image 'edf-linux-disk-image-amd-cortexa53-mali-common.rootfs.wic.xz' to block device '/dev/sdk' using bmap file 'edf-linux-disk-image-amd-cortexa53-mali-common.rootfs.wic.bmap' bmaptool: info: 100% copied bmaptool: info: synchronizing '/dev/sdk' bmaptool: info: copying time: 4m 51.7s, copying speed 3.0 MiB/sec

WARNING: Booting multiple image with the same root file system partition UUID may result in boot issues. In EDF, the Linux kernel locates the correct root filesystem by passing the root=PARTUUID=XXXX parameter in the kernel command line.

In EDF 2025.05 the PARTUUID parameter is hard-coded meaning that it is not possible to have multiple image connected to a board - for example, an SD card and USB key with the same image. This may result in undetermined behavior or boot errors as uboot and the linux kernel may enumerate the devices differently and the kernel will mount the first partition it finds with the matching PARTUUID.

In EDF 2025.11 the PARTUUID is randomly generated for each image (build) so it is possible to have different images on different media and have the system boot correctlly. It is still not possible to have the same image on multiple media.

Booting the Board to Linux

Ensure that the boot mode switch is configured for OSPI boot mode: (ON,ON,ON,OFF = 0001).

See the picture below for reference (ZCU104 evaluation board, SW1)

ZCU104 boot select switch (SW6)

Plug in the Micro SD card.

 

On a Linux system, all FTDI devices will be found in /dev/ttyUSB[0123] and on a Windows host these will be COM[XX] - it will be necessary to identify the correct device node on a Windows system using the Device Manager.

Use a terminal emulator such as PuTTY or picocom to the appropriate node: 

john@enho:~$ picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB1 picocom v3.1 port is : /dev/ttyUSB1 flowcontrol : none <snip> Type [C-a] [C-h] to see available commands Terminal ready

 

Upon first boot, Linux requires a password to be set for the default user account.

AMD EDF 25.05 (ZCU104) - AMD Vivado™ Design Suite 2025.1

  • Default username 'amd-edf'

First Login Prompt:

AMD Embedded Development Framework Linux distribution 25.05+release-c6500fc0db8ea079fdde3c78ead3c650850c1497 amd-edf ttyAMA1 amd-edf login: amd-edf You are required to change your password immediately (administrator enforced). New password: Retype new password: WARNING: AMD Embedded Development Framework is a reference Yocto Project distribution that should be used for testing and development purposes only. It is recommended that you create your own distribution for production use. amd-edf:~$

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