Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Vivado 2012.4 Digilent USB/JTAG with RHEL6 64b

Getting the Digilent bits to work properly with Vivado 2012.4 with RHEL6 64b can be a bit of a dance. Clear webcase reporting to Xilinx is the best way to help drive this issue to ground. Here at AR Auburn, we have refined our procedure for the delta on top of the vanilla 2012.4 install:

Follow the AR42728 . Note that it is now applicable to 14.4/2012.4. The current version of libusb at this writing is 1.0.9, no big deal.

For the next steps, take all the default options...
  • cd to /opt/Xilinx/14.4/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin64/digilent
  • cd to /digilent.adept.runtime_2.9.9-x86_64, run the install script with root permission
  • cd to /ftdi.drivers_1.0.4-x86_64, run the install script with root permission
  • cd to /libCseDigilent_2.2.10-x86_64, run the install script without root permission
We have found this gets us user (non-root) access for both impact and xsdk with the KC705, VC707, and ZedBoard. If it doesn't work for you, well, there should be a webcase in your future.

Update 2013-06-11: Be sure to look at the updated Xilinx Answer record AR54382. With Vivado 2013.2 just about out the door, this is where you want to start to get your hardware session straight!

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Vivado 2012.4

For three weeks now we have been all over Xilinx' release of Vivado 2012.4 . We are excited about this release for several reasons. We have been using 28nm 7-series silicon for sometime with the KC705 and VC707 TDPs; and soon we will increase Zynq's participation in the mix. Although only in beta test at this point, the rapidly maturing functionality of IP Integrator got our attention as well. While running native on RHEL6.3 we've seen zero crashes; and love that we can have any mixture of command-line, scripted and GUI build awesomeness.