The Simple PCIe FMC Carrier (SPEC) can be deployed into a x86 or x86-64 Linux machine to be used as a White Rabbit interface card or a general purpose FMC carrier with gigabit transceiver support. The usual way to go while in development, relies in using a full-blown Linux distribution for compiling the software, loading the drivers… so the host acts as a workstation.

But the real point is that, in an actual on-the-field deployment, the SPEC host is not going to act as a workstation anymore, but as a purpose-specific embedded computer instead. In order to cope with this situation, is desirable to use an embedded Linux toolchain, so that we can generate/reproduce a full runtime image from the software sources at any time.

The meta-spec project contains a Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded meta layer providing the main functionalities (software, kernel modules, reconfigurable FPGA bitstream…) associated with the SPEC board. In this way, by adding the features in this layer to an x86 or x86-64 Yocto Project image, it’s very easy to build production grade Linux runtimes with full out-of-the-box SPEC / White Rabbit support.

Contact