Petelinux installation in Virtual Machine

[engr_joni_ee]

Hi,

I have a Linux system and I am wondering if I can directly install Petalinux in a directory but some people do the installation in the other way. They first install Oracle Virtual Box and then Install Linux in the Virtual Box and then install Petalinux inside that. Which option is better ?

 

[FvM]

Linux systems are installed in disk partitions, not directories. You can setup a multi boot system using a linux boot manager.

 

[engr_joni_ee]

The system already has Linux operating system. The question is how necessary is to install Petalinux in Virtual Machine ?

If I install Virtual Machine and then Petalinux then only a part of the CPU cores and RAM will be assigned to run Virtual Machine this will slow down performance.

 

[FvM]

Yes, if you need maximal performance, you want a multi-boot installation.

 

[engr_joni_ee]

HI, I am sure if I fully understand the meaning of multi-boot installation. Can you please explain ? My main question is which approach is better performance wise ? Either to install Petalinux directly on Ubuntu LTS 18.04 or first install Oracle Virtual Machine and then install Petalinux ? Petalinux is upported by Xilinx for ZYNQ 7000.

 

[FvM]

I was under the assumption that you want to keep the standard Linux installation and use Petalinux specifically for FPGA development. I presume performance is critical, because FPGA compilation time of complex designs is always too long. Thus I suggested a native Linux installation instead of a virtual machine. It would be setup as multi boot with the standard Linux started by default. You'll find sufficient instructions how to do.

You can however maximize the performance of a virtual machine by assigning most of the available RAM and CPU cores. It may be that the difference to a native Linux installation that owns 100% of the computer resources isn't so big, you can try.

--- Updated Sep 22, 2021 ---

There's a lot of discussions about VM performance, also about pro and con of Vivado on VM. Don't want to retell it.

Regarding VM performance in general, they seem to confirm what I presumed above. The VM overhead is small, but you need to assign reserve sufficient resources.

 

[engr_joni_ee]

Hi, is it always necessary to install Petalinux in Virtual Machine ? How about to install Petalinux directly on the standard Linux machine ?