Embedded Development Tools

[mariuszgrad]

Hi,

I wanted to share my knowledge about running xilinx tools under Leopard OS X.

To run xilinx tools normally I use Windows XP under Parallels with OS X on my fancy macbook pro.

Recently I needed to do quite a lot of scripting (low level work involved with generating custom compiler for powerpc and eapr). 

I've started doing that with my mentioned before setup and after a while I knew that I had to go to linux.

Xilinx tools they use cygwin under windows to do the job - and that didn't work correctly.

First I tried to use bash scripts to do the job but it was really strange - especially when I used functions which executed some external application.

This things often hangout or dumped core. Very strange. At that point I knew that to do the job I need to get out of cygwin.

So I decided to install all my tools under Linux with Parallels and use python or ruby to do the job.

For 3 days I tried different combinations (FC8, FC9, Ubuntu8, Centos) with different Parallels build (upto version 3 build 5602) and different kernel versions.

I could install all tools but usb jtag wasn't able to work all the time.

I tried user space driver (libusb) and jungo windrv (one provided with xilinx) with different kernel version.

It didn't work out completly. Whenever I tried to reprogram fpga with impact it ended with errors like this:

Disabling IRQ9, usb_transfer: -110 (error sending control message: Connection timed out) etc.

After investigation it seems that the problem exists in Parallels - not in Linux configuration.

It work perfectly with VMWare Fusion.

So the conclusion is if you would start to work under Mac then use vmware fusion instead of parallels.

Greetings, Mariusz. 

[ekendahl]

Interesting find. I see the same issue. Tools run fine under //VM (and winXP) but I can't program the FPGA. Seem like an issue with //. I wonder if anyone has tried using virtualBox.