Hello everyone,
I have an issue, and perhaps someone has encountered something similar and can provide assistance. Currently, we have an Arria 10 board where the U-boot, FPGA config, etc., are stored on the SD card. Everything is functioning as expected. However, a customer has a requirement that there should be no persistent writable memory, and the kernel, etc., cannot reside locally. Therefore, the SD card with the U-boot bootloader is hardware write-protected.
The idea is for U-boot to retrieve the necessary files from a TFTP/NFS server. Unfortunately, in U-boot, only the SDRAM from HPS is available, but it is too small to initialize the DDR RAM for the FPGA config. Even with the early IO release option, the peripheral is still too large. As updates will be rolled out over time, the FPGA config will also be frequently changed.
Is there a way to directly load the FPGA config from the TFTP/NFS server into the FPGA? Or is there a possibility of reconfiguring the FPGA during runtime? This way, a config could be stored on the SD card and updated from the TFTP server during the second boot. Do you have any other ideas on how to address this issue? Unfortunately, transitioning from Arria 10 to a SoC FPGA where the DDR RAM is on the HPS side is not an option for us.
Thank you.