μHAL
μHAL

This project implements a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for LNLS's FPGA devices, which use the PCIe bus and conform to the MicroTCA (μTCA) standard. No daemons or kernel drivers are necessary.

Along with the main library, we have the decode-reg utility, which can read and write into hardware registers – with proper encoding and decoding – enabling inspection and debugging of devices as well as directly controlling them.

How to build

This projects uses the Meson build system. The build steps are simple:

$ meson setup build
$ ninja -C build

You can export LDFLAGS=-static to the meson command to create a static binary that can be exported to other machines. This is relevant because we use some C++20 features, which might not be available with the installed compiler/runtime on an older platform.

How to install

In order to install only this project's files, and not any subproject's, the command below can be used:

$ meson install -C build/ --skip-subprojects

How to use

Run decode-reg without any arguments to see the available operation modes. With the operation mode selected, the -h flag can be used to view all the available options.

Documentation

The documentation is available online. Make sure to take a look at the Related Pages for project history, motivation, and design!

How to build documentation locally

The documentation can be built with Doxygen and browsed from the html/index.html page:

$ doxygen
$ ${your_browser} html/index.html