Arctic Tern

The Talos II and Blackbird uses the AST2500 for it's Base Management Controller, which handles power on and power off requests and other tasks. The AST2500 boots both computers slowly and is not open source friendly. Raptor Engineering created the Arctic Tern FPGA as a replacement BMC, which boots both computers nearly instantly.

The Arctic Tern Manual can be a little light on some details. This page is intended to provide additional information to help you get started using arctic tern. Raptor does not provide a downloadable binary that one can flash to an Arctic tern. Instead one needs to compile the image from source. It is highly recommended that you use Debian 11 to compile the binary.

You can find debian 11's net-install iso image here. You may need to install Debian 11 on a power9 machine with a com port. Once you have installed debian 11, update apt's /etc/apt/sources.list file with the line below, so that you can install packages.

deb https://archive.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main contrib

Then run sudo apt update. Now you can install packages. I found myself needing to install these additional packages:

sudo apt install cmake libftdi1-dev libarchive-zip-perl

yosys gotchas

I found myself having to run this command to properly set up yosys.

git submodule update --init

I also found out that yosys was installed to /usr/usr/local/bin/yosys. I made some symlinks from /usr/usr/local/bin/yosys to /usr/local/bin/.

nextpnr gotchas

I could not get the manual's cmake invocation to work:

cmake -DARCH=ecp5 -DTRELLIS_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .

I ended up having to upgrade to upgrade my cmake to a newer version via debian backports. Just add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb https://archive.debian.org/debian/ bullseye-backports main contrib

Then you run to run sudo apt update. Now you can install a newer version of cmake via sudo apt install -t bullseye-backports cmake. This is the cmake invocation that worked for me.

cmake . -B build -DARCH=ecp5 -DTRELLIS_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr

systemd gotchas

systemd may try to use your /dev/ttyUSB0 device for you, which may cause some issues. Simply disable it via:

sudo systemctl stop serial-getty@USB0.service

sudo systemctl disable serial-getty@USB0.service