Software platforms

A software platform is a collection of libraries and drivers that will form the lowest layer of your application software stack. Your software applications must link against or run on top of a given software platform using the APIs that it provides. Therefore, before you can create and use software applications in SDK, you must create a software platform. Xilinx® SDK includes the following two software platforms:

Standalone - A simple, semi-hosted and single-threaded environment that provides basic features like standard input/output and access to processor hardware features
Xilkernel - A simple and lightweight kernel that provides POSIX style services such as scheduling, threads, synchronization, message passing, and timers

When a software platform is built, the following software components are automatically included into the library:

Standard C Libraries (libc.a, libm.a)
Device Drivers for all the peripherals in your design (libxil.a)

Other libraries

Both Standalone and Xilkernel can work with the following libraries from the Xilinx software library collection:

LibXil MFS - A Memory File system
LibXil FATFS - A Xilinx SysAce-based FAT file system
LibXil Flash - A library that provides read/write/erase/lock/unlock and device specific functionalities for parallel flash devices
LibXil Isf - In-System-Flash library that supports the Xilinx In System Flash hardware
lwIP - A third-party light-weight TCP/IP networking library

You can configure these libraries to be in or out of your software application stack.

In addition to the above software platforms and component libraries, many third party RTOSes and middleware stacks are available and can be used in the SDK environment to develop applications. For a comprehensive listing of all third party offerings, refer to http://www.xilinx.com/ise/embedded/epartners/listing.htm.

Software platforms and their libraries can be configured in various ways in the Software Platform Settings dialog box. You can also have multiple software platforms in your SDK workspace. This allows you to simultaneously work with different kinds configurations of software platforms, as well as retarget applications from one to the other.

Board Support Packages

Creating a software platform
Configuring a software platform
Building a software platform
Installing third-party software components

New Software Platform Project dialog box