Intel FPGA PAC D5005 - Operating System

[craig-dillabaugh]

Hi,

We have acquired an older Intel FPGA, and are hoping to run some experiments with it.  According to the instructions here:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/programmable/683394/2-0-1/system-requirements-and-release-installation.html

In order to install the needed software we need to run with an very old OS (RHEL 7/CentOS 7), but to install such an old distro's is a nuisance on the modern HW we have to run on FPGA on.  

Just curious from someone who has experience on these devices if the OS requirement is 'hard' or if we might have success with a more modern Linux OS, or if we should start looking for some ancient HW to run with this.

Cheers,

Craig

[craig-dillabaugh]

As a follow up to my own question, if I install a newer OS on our HW and then install Qemu or similar and install my older RHEL/CentOS on the VM.   Is it likely to be problematic to access the FPGA through a guest OS like this.

Cheers,

Craig

[khtan]

Hi Craig,

The documentation that you were referring to is actually an archived version of the older acceleration stack for D5005. We have already transition to Open FPGA Stack (OFS) that can support D5005 and it is based on either RHEL, CENTOS 8 stream, Ubuntu 22.04 (just example of the later OS versions/ different OS after Centos 7).

You might want to refer to this manuals instead for the setup (https://ofs.github.io/ofs-2024.1-1/hw/doc_modules/contents_s10_pcie_attach/)

Just one catch though, as I know you might plan to run the HE library (https://github.com/intel/hexl-fpga) , this library is build based on Centos 7 dependencies so I'm suspecting you might run into dependency build issues when building the HE acceleration library

 

It might be possible that you still can build this on Centos 8 stream without any issues, but it was not tested/verified before.

As for your follow up question on virtual machine , you can refer to the documentation (https://ofs.github.io/ofs-2024.1-1/d5005/ug_kvm/) . Technically you should be able to build on VM Centos 7 access the link back to the host machine FPGA

Thanks

Regards

Kian

[craig-dillabaugh]

Thank you Kian.

This is very helpful.

Craig

[khtan]

Hi Craig,

May I know whether this issue has been resolved on your end?

Thanks

Regards

Kian