Rust on the Noel-V

Experiments of running Rust code on the Noel-V processor on an Arty-A7 FPGA board.

This repository currently contains the following components:

• gateware contains instructions on how to download and flash a pre-built Noel-V design to the Arty-A7 board.
• firmware contains Rust code for the Noel-V processor. It contains the following components:
  • grlib library which contains generic drivers for GRLIB components.
  • noelv library which contains Noel-V specific drivers and components.
  • arty-a7 application which contains various applications you can flash
  • arty-a7-embassy application which contains example apps using the embassy framework.

Prerequisites

To build and run Rust software on the Noel-V, you need the following tools.

• Rust installation for building the firmware
• just command runner installation
• grmon installation for flashing the firmware
• Optional: NCC installation or gdb-multiarch if you want to do GDB debugging.

Setting up the Arty-A7

You need to prepare the Noel-V core first by flashing the corresponding FPGA design to the board. The gateware README gives instructions on how to do this.

Flashing the firmware

After you have prepared the board, you can simply use cargo run --release --bin arty_a7 inside the firmware folder to flash an example application to the board. The project justfile and .cargo/config.toml configure a runner which calls grmon and uses it to flash and run the Rust application.