It's true that you can generally compile larger designs on Linux, but
I don't believe the end-to-end stability is (yet) as good as windows.
There is a difference between memory-mapping capability and program
stability.
ISE/EDK is generally much faster under Linux (and I regularly move my
design across to a Linux box for these stages of the compiles), but I
can't say the same for sysgen or Matlab.
Also, if you run winXP with the /3GB option, it can compile for ROACH
packed to 99% albeit very slowly. This won't be true for ROACH-II and
you'll have to move to a 64bit machine.
My understanding is that Steve is looking to do a small, quick proof-
of-concept design. For that, I still recommend Windows XP 32bit. It's
easy to setup, runs more reliably and it (mostly) just as capable for
our purposes.
Jason
On 15 Mar 2010, at 14:08, John Ford wrote:
Billy Mallard wrote:
I'm still investigating the 11.x flow on Linux. It's not ready for
prime-time yet: I sometimes have Matlab disappearing on me,
compiles
that sometimes take significantly longer (22hrs), ridiculous memory
usage (over 16GB) etc etc.
my experience has been the exact opposite of what Jason is
describing.
Fwiw, i've been running the toolflow under Debian. I think Jason has
only tested under CentOS. Neither of these is supported by Xilinx,
so
we're in the process of switching our toolflow servers to Red Hat.
In fact, RHEL5 is what we started officially recommending in
February:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01228.html
I'd strongly recommend trying Red Hat.
FWIW, I found the same thing as Billy, that is, a large design utterly
fails to build on Windows as it runs out of memory. We run Red Hat
here,
and the tools are pretty stable once we got it all figured out
(thanks to
all at casper!) There are a few differences and gotchas between the
linux
and windows versions.
One is the the case sensitivity.
Another is that you can't install xilinx tools using a symbolic link.
This annoyed our sysadmin immensely, as it complicates any upgrade
process.
In fact, our version 10.1 tools are pretty stable on Windows for
smaller
designs.
John
Billy
