Xilinx ISE on Linux

The FPGA vendor Xilinx very early started to offer their development tools (ISE, WebPack) for Linux. Unfortunately there are still some problems, for which workarounds are documented here.

Wind/U X-toolkit Error: wuDisplay: Can't open display

This error message comes from the Windows-to-Unix toolkit they use for their GUI. It doesn't like the DISPLAY=:0.0 value. The workaround is to set it to ":0"

export DISPLAY=:0

The problem was seen with ISE 10.1 and 12.3.

Kudos for pointing out the solution go to circuitben.

XILINX JTAG tools on Linux without proprietary kernel modules

For more detailed information please visit http://www.rmdir.de/~michael/xilinx/.

On Debian you need fxload

aptitude install fxload

and then setup the necessary files (as root!)

/opt/Xilinx/ISE/10.1/ISE/bin/lin/setup_pcusb

This installs some files to /usr/share (yes, directly, but Impact really requires them there :-( ). Ensure that the .hex files in /usr/share are world-readable.

Before you start the ISE, set the environment variable

export XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB=1

The above instructions are required for ISE 10.1, 12.3 and 12.4.

The JTAG tool has the following USB IDs

unconfigured	03fd:000f
configured	03fd:0008

(see also: /etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules).

FPGA Editor

The FPGA Editor of ISE 12.4 needs Motif 3 (libXm.so.3). Luckily libXm.so.4 can also be used, so simply set a symbol link.

cd /usr/bin
ln -s libXm.so.4 libXm.so.3

The tool also requires libstdc++-5.

aptitude install libstdc++-5

Simulation with ISIM

ISim converts the VHDL and Verilog files to C files and uses gcc to compile them.They ship GCC and all libraries, but these didn't work for me and others. The following trick helped by replacing the shipped version of libstdc++ by the one of the Linux system.

cd /opt/Xilinx/ISE/12.4/ISE_DS/ISE/lib/lin64
rm libstdc++.so libstdc++.so.6
ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 .
ln -s libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so