On 6/20/06, tsuraan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Howard, Andy, and I did our due dilligence on the OGD1 design to make
> sure that it was really going to meet our needs. To test that we
> would be able to fit an OGA-compliant design into the ECP2-50, we
> cobbled together a resource-equivalent "design" from pieces from old
> designs we'd done in the past. We blew the resource count by a
> significant margin. Our determination is that the 3S4000 is the only
> chip available within the next 6 months that will meet our needs, so
> we're switching back.
Have you used the Xilinx tools under Linux? I tried it once, but they
require a kernel-space driver for the parallel port programming tools
(wtf?) and only offer it in binary form, and I believe they only
support RHEL. I couldn't even get the driver to load under the
equivalent CentOS. I only tried the free Webkit, since I don't have
the money for the full version, but I really didn't have any luck at
all with getting the actual device programming to work.
I tried to use the RHEL version, but I was unable to get it to run on
my Gentoo box. I got part way through getting the Windows version
running under Wine, but ran into crashes with that too.
It's going to be a pain, and I don't have a solution to it. Either we
go with the ECP2-50 and have a board that doesn't meet our needs for
graphics chip development, or we go with the Xilinx and have tool
problems. Were the Lattice tools really that much better with Linux?
I think the short-term solution will be to yank out the binaries for
Xilinx's synthesis and p&r tools and run them under Wine. It's the
IDE that crashes, so if we can figure out the command-line options for
the lower-level command-line tools, we can run them under Linux. We
might even be able to get the native Linux ones to work stand-alone
like this too. We'll need some help from Xilinx, which I'm sure we
can get for something like THIS, and perhaps we can make an existing
Linux IDE work with it in some reasonable way. The next thing to do
is to beg the Wine people to figure out what's missing and get it
running. I'm sure Xilinx are smart enough to realize that it's
generally good for business to support users, especially when they
come in crowds. :)
Admittedly, physically programming the device is going to be a pain,
if you have to use the external cable. But our goal is to make it
programmable via PCI, though the XP10. For this, we'll need to
develop our own programming tool anyhow!
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