The Xilinx setup tutorials demonstrate two paths to setting up the DPU. One route provides a pre-built PetaLinux system image with code examples, precompiled example binaries, and pre-trained models. The image can be flashed onto an SD card, and you should be able to boot the board directly from the SD card. Vivado and Vitis are not required. In fact, you can plug in a display and keyboard onto the ZCU104 board and use the board in standalone mode. It is also possible to SSH into the board over a network and interact with the board over SSH. More on that later. The other route, found here, shows how to start from a board design in Vivado and work your way up to Vitis and develop custom applications [1]. That is not a part of this guide; we will stick to the first option only for now.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of programming in C++ for my work. I have also switched my editor of choice from Atom to VS Code. One of my favorite plugins on VS Code is C/C++ ms-vscode.cpptools
. This is plugin offers great features like code auto-formatting, IntelliSense (code suggestions), and syntax highlighting for C and C++. These features are reminiscent of working in Visual Studio and for a text editor, that’s plenty.