Troubleshooting

Build failures

Check the following if the project fails to build or generate a bitstream:

  1. Are you using the correct version of Vivado for this version of the repository?
    Check the version specified in the Requirements section of the README.md file. Note that this project is regularly updated and you may have to refer to an earlier commit of this repo if you are using an older version of Vivado.

  2. Did you correctly follow the build instructions?
    Please check the build instructions carefully as you may have missed a step.

  3. Did you copy/clone the repo into a short directory structure?
    Windows doesn’t cope well with long directory structures, so copy/clone the repo into a short directory structure such as C:\projects\. When working in long directory structures, you can get errors relating to missing files, particularly files that are normally generated by Vivado (FIFOs, etc).

PetaLinux issues

make petalinux exits non-zero with sstate _setscene fetch errors

If a make petalinux TARGET=<board> run ends with errors like

ERROR: <package>-<ver>-r0 do_..._setscene: Fetcher failure: Unable to find file file://.../sstate:...
[ERROR] Command bitbake petalinux-image-minimal failed

the actual build is not broken. The _setscene errors come from bitbake trying to pull prebuilt artifacts from the public Xilinx sstate-cache mirror, which occasionally returns 404 for individual packages. Bitbake then falls back to building those packages locally and succeeds — but the wrapper still exits non-zero because of the failed fetches, so the Makefile stops before the petalinux-package step that produces BOOT.BIN.

Fix: re-run the same command. The second attempt finds the missing packages in the local sstate cache (populated by the first run) and completes cleanly, producing BOOT.BIN. The reference design itself is fine; this is a transient issue with the public mirror.

Ports not working

Check the following if you are unable to get ports working in PetaLinux.

  1. Check the interface-to-port assignment for your design
    The assignment of interfaces (eg. eth0, eth1, eth2, etc) to ports (eg. Ethernet FMC port 0, 1, 2 and 3) is specific to the design that you are using. The interface to port assignment is documented here.

  2. Each port must be assigned to a different subnet
    If you assign interface eth0 to IP address 192.168.1.10, then you must use a different subnet for the IP address of eth1, eth2 and eth3. Multiple ports that are managed under Linux must be assigned to different subnets, or they will not work. An example address assignment would be eth0=192.168.1.10, eth1=192.168.2.10, eth2=192.168.3.10, eth3=192.168.4.10.

Dropped pings/packets

No dropped packets are to be expected with our example designs. If you are experiencing dropped packets of any kind, this can be an indication of one of the following issues:

  • Timing in the FPGA design is not optimal (check for timing errors in the Vivado design)

  • Timing of the RGMII interface is not optimal (can be due to the FPGA design or the PHY configuration)

We ensure that there are no timing errors or issues on all of our designs before making a release, so typically this problem occurs on custom designs where the timing issues have not yet been optimized. Please contact us for support if you are experiencing dropped packets.