Zephyr on LiteX Coreblocks

Zephyr on LiteX Coreblocks is a reference LiteX SoC builder for the litex_coreblocks platform in Zephyr.

See supported boards in make.py, note that it's not too hard to add a new one.

Zephyr patched with Coreblocks support is located here

Prerequisites

Using Virtual Environment is recomended.

Install LiteX with full configuration to include coreblocks (NOTE: coreblocks support was recently merged into upstream LiteX, you may need to manually checkout latest commit after install instead of 2024.12 tag).

Build

Build the bitstream with following command:

./make.py --build

Build options

Load bitstream

Connect your board using the serial port and load the bitstream:

./make.py --load

You should see a default LiteX bootloader at reset.

After building Zephyr binary image you can upload it with litex_term and serialboot:

litex_term /dev/ttyUSBX --speed 115200 --kernel zephyr.bin

---

Option	Help
--board	select target board
--build	build bitstream
--load	load bitstream
--doc	generate SoC documentation

SoC Customization

Zephyr configuration is made specifcally to match SoC defined in this repository.

If SoC parameters are changed, peripherals added or modified, it is needed to modify Zephyr /dts/riscv/litex/litex-coreblocks.dtsi, /boards/enjoydigital/litex_coreblocks/litex_coreblocks.dts device trees and possibly other configurations.

Device trees inculde address of each peripheral (LiteX) CSR regiter, interrupt maps. Those values are dynamically generated with LiteX SoC. You can obtain them from generated SoC documentation. To help making changes to SoC, base addresses of existing peripherals and interrupt maps are manually fixed in soc.py.

You can look-up more LiteX-specific peripheral device tree entries from litex-vexriscv.dtsi in Zephyr.

Coreblocks uses hart-local interrupt controller, so there are 16 "platform-specific" interrupts available for connection, that are remapped in firq dts from ids 16..31 to 0..15 to match LiteX interrupt numbers.

Coreblocks Customization

There are fixed standard, full, and tiny fixed configurations available by default to select from LiteX.

Note that Zephyr configuration uses standard variant and architecture specific details (like ISA extensions), need to be adjusted in Zephyr SoC Kconfigs and device trees.

To (currently) use coreblocks with custom CoreConfigurations or apply some patches, it is needed to modify sources in pythondata-cpu-coreblocks and reinstall it. LiteX will use new sources automatically on next build. It is recommended to change one of existing configurations, otherwise patching litex.soc.cores.cpu is also need to recognize new variant.

You may want to update pythondata-cpu-coreblocks to latest commit of coreblocks as well :)

Notes

• Ethernet support is currently broken on Zephyr. This is possibly a Zephyr driver bug, needs further investigation.