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If, hypothetically, I wanted to slave the Arria V SoC Card to a PC, I Would get -two- One-Stop cards, plug one into the PC and one into the socket on the Arria V card, and connect them with a cable.
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Yes.
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Then I would configure the PCI-E block on the FPGA to present an external slave interface (and possibly configure the cards as to which is master and slave), and it should work. Yes? (BTW - the cards list on Amazon for $175 each :-) )
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You should not have to configure anything, since the Arria V SoC U-Boot or Linux will configure the OneStopSystems board (setup its PCIe base address). What you will be missing is "How to I use the OneStopSystems card?"
For example, if you want to DMA a block of data from your PC over to the Arria V SoC, how do you do something like that? I assume there is some form of PCIe chipset on the OneStop PCIe board, and that you will need to program the DMA controller on those boards. The ExpressCard I have is a direct connection to a PLX chip on the motherboard I have, and the link is effectively transparent. In your case, you want to hook a root-complex to a root-complex through what effectively needs to be a non-transparent bridge, so that both PCIe root-complex devices see a single PCIe peripheral (the OneStopSystems boards).
Those "words" are all the right things to describe what you want, so you can always contact OneStopSystems and ask them this same question directly.
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And yes, comparatively speaking, booting LINUX on the SoC Card isn't looking so bad. 8-}
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Right, at which point you may also realize that using a network cable to talk to the SoC kit is also an easier solution than using the OneStopSystems boards.
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One thing though - if I do boot LINUX on the SoC Card, what stands in for the 'hard disk' (I.e., O/S and file storage)? The SDcard?
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Yes. Its likely that the board has a Quad SPI flash for FPGA bit-file storage, and possibly U-Boot bootloader storage. Once the bootloader runs, it'll configure the DDR memory, copy Linux "from somewhere" (most likely the SDcard), and then boot. The
RocketBoards.org site should explain it somewhere.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
