Xilinx Board Utility (xbutil)

IMPORTANT: The xbutil utility replaces the xbsak utility, which is being deprecated.

The Xilinx® Board Utility (xbutil) is a standalone command line utility that is included with the Xilinx Run Time (XRT) installation package. It includes multiple commands to validate and identify the installed card(s) along with additional card details including DDR, PCIe®, shell name (DSA), and system information. This information can be used for both card administration and application debugging. Some of these include:

  • Card administration tasks:
    • Flash card configuration memory of the card.
    • Reset hung cards.
    • Query card status, sensors, and PCI Express AER registers.
  • Debug operations:
    • Download the SDAccel™ binary (.xclbin) to FPGA.
    • Test DMA for PCIe bandwidth.
    • Show status of compute units.

The xbutil command line format is:

xbutil <command> [options]

where the available commands are given below. Specific command options are detailed in the respective command topics:

To run the xbutil command without prepending the path /opt/xilinx/xrt/bin/, run the following command.

Use the following command in csh shell:

$ source /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.csh

Use the following command in bash shell:

$ source /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh
Note: The sudo access is required for the flash and flash scan options.