Five years later
It is almost five years since I started my FPGA design from scratch blog. What has happened to me and what has happened at Xilinx during these years? Let's find out.
What has happened to me
Five years ago I had my own one-man consulting company, ZooCad Consulting looking for ASIC and FPGA design work. Today I work at somewhat larger consulting company, Realtime Embedded specialized in software and hardware design for embedded systems.
Realtime Embedded
The focus here at Realtime Embedded is the development of embedded systems. We have many years of experience with system design, hardware, software, project management, and, test and verification. Our consultants are not only technically knowledgeable, they are highly experienced and they all know what characterises successful projects.
What has happened at Xilinx
They released Design Suite 13.2.
We will download the latest versions of ISE and EDK (Embedded Edition) and take a look at all the new features. Here is the download page. Here are the ISE Design Suite 13.2 Release Notes.
We will download the full installer for Linux. The tar file is 4.62 GB!!!!
We save this file in a temporary directory where we have at least 5GB of free disk space. When the the file has been downloaded (it will take some time) it is unpacked using the following command:
--> tar xvf Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_13.2_0.61xd.0.0.tar.
Here is the result:
To start the installation use the following command:
--> cd ..../Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_13.2_0.61xd.0.0
--> sudo ./xsetup
After accepting the license agreements we have to select what to install.
We install the ISE Design Suite: System Edition in the directory /opt/Xilinx/13.2. Disk space required: 15641 MB.
We are ready to start the installation.
When we click the Install button the installation starts:
This is what has been installed:
Getting a node-locked license
Before we can start using the Design Suite tools we have get a license from the Xilinx Product Licensing page.
We will obtain a node-locked evaluation license for 45 days which can be extended to 90 days in total. A node-locked license is locked to one host and the Ethernet MAC address of the host is used to tie the license to that machine. Click the Generate Node-Locked License button.
Adding the host.
Use the following command to find the MAC address on a Linux machine:
--> ifconfig -a
Look for the eth0 entry and find the HWaddr:
The license file will be generated and can be downloaded from the Product Licensing page:
Click the arrow-down button to download the license file Xilinx.lic file to your download directory. To finish the license file installation we have to create a directory called .Xilinx in our home directory and move the license file to this directory.
Getting a floating license
Floating licensing is a software licensing approach in which a limited number of licenses for a software application are shared among a larger number of users over time. When an authorized user wishes to run the application they request a license from a central license server. If a license is available the license server allows the application to run. When they finish using the application, or when the allowed license period expires, the license is reclaimed by the license server and made available to other authorized users.
Setting up a license server
To setup a license server we first have to download the License Management Tools from the Xilinx download page.
We will download the 32/64 -bit Linux version.
Unzip and install the files in a directory in the license server host.
Make sure all programs are executable.
Edit the license file
Edit the license file Xilinx.lic and add the following line:
DAEMON xilinxd <path to xilinxd daemon>
Starting the license server
Use the following command to start the license server:
-->/opt/Xilinx/license/bin/lin64/lmgrd -c /opt/Xilinx/license/Xilinx.lic -l /opt/Xilinx/log/lic_log.log
Use this command to see if the license server is up and running:
--> /opt/Xilinx/license/bin/lin64/lmutil lmstat -a -c /opt/Xilinx/license/Xilinx.lic
Use this command to run license server diagnostics:
--> /opt/Xilinx/license/bin/lin64/lmutil lmdiag -c /opt/Xilinx/license/Xilinx.lic
On the client side
Add the following line to your .bashrc file to connect to the license server
export XILINXD_LICENSE_FILE=<port number>@<hostname>
See the license file for the host name <Superdatorn> and port number <2100>.
Just one more thing
Don't forget to source the settings file. In our case the command looks like this:
--> source /opt/Xilinx/13.2/ISE_DS/settings64.sh
Be careful
When we source the settings64.sh file the following paths will be added th the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
/opt/Xilinx/13.2/ISE_DS/common/lib/lin64
/opt/Xilinx/13.2/ISE_DS/ISE/sysgen/lib
/opt/Xilinx/13.2/ISE_DS/ISE/lib/lin64/
/opt/Xilinx/13.2/ISE_DS/ISE/smartmodel/lin64/installed_lin64/lib
/opt/Xilinx/13.2/ISE_DS/EDK/lib/lin64
This can cause problems when running other programs. Here is one error message I got when trying to start rapidsvn.
To fix this problem I had to run the following command: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=""
