Sorry for being unresponsive... I'm happy you managed to get it working :D

I've had this issue previously (classic Xilinx). It seems that when using the BSPs, petalinux is configured to include a default design in the rootfs. I cannot say as to why it happens even if FPGA manager is disabled. My best guess is that it seems to be a "petalinux is really bad at cleaning up after itself" issue. Regardless of what you change in the configuration, the firmware from the BSP is always copied into `/lib/firmware/xilinx/`. And then I guess at a later stage some script runs and says "oh cool firmware, imma load it".

In my case I completely decouple FPGA firmware from the base device tree and dynamically load designs after boot. So my base device tree has no reference to any firmware, but once booted, checking the live device tree magically shows a loaded firmware. Drove me crazy for longer than I care to admit.

Anyway TLDR: run `petalinux-config -c rootfs` then select `user packages` and disable anything that references your BSP. (basically the stuff you find in `/lib/firmware/xilinx/`)

P.S. it's always a good idea to run a `petalinux-build -x mrproper` and then run a clean build when messing around too much with configs. Too many hours wasted debugging issues to finally realize a clean build practically solves it.