Using the Xilinx Alliance 2.1i Tools under Linux

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Why Use Linux/Wine for Executing the Xilinx Tools?
3. Capturing a Xilinx Install to Work with Linux
4. Setting Up Your Environment
5. Running the Tools
6. Speed

Though the Xilinx Alliance tools are not compiled for Linux, many of the tools appear to work just fine under the Wine emulator. Version 991212 of the emulator appears to be better in most respects than previous versions and only a few caveats exist when using Wine for executing the command-line Alliance tools.

In the BYU Configurable Computing Laboratory, we have been using Linux to process designs since December 1999 with the Xilinx Alliance 2.1i tools and Service Pack 3. This arrangement has been very stable for Xilinx XC4000 designs. Unfortunately, some Virtex designs seem to cause memory problems in Wine so we cannot process these particular designs under Linux using Wine; other Virtex designs appear to have no problems at all under Wine. As of April 2000, we have been trying Service Pack 6, but we cannot report much on the stability of the tools at this point.

Before describing how to do all of this, I should put forth the following disclaimer. This information is provided as an aid for using the Xilinx tools under Linux. We are not "supporting" this information, though, if you have questions, we would be glad to help as time allows. Xilinx would probably laugh if you contacted them for support of this arrangement. Further, as always, you should stay within the number of contracted Xilinx licenses to stay legal and supported. This information should be in no way used to circumvent or ignore the license agreements for Xilinx software.

I will first discuss why you might want to try this approach out to process Xilinx designs. Next, I will describe how to capture a Xilinx install to work with Linux and then I will briefly describe the process of setting up your environment to execute the Xilinx Alliance 2.1i tools using that installation and wine. After this explanation, I will provide some hints on how to execute the Xilinx tools using Wine and what will not currently work with Wine. Lastly, I provide some execution times for generating Xilinx designs under Wine.

Linux is your main desktop platform.

Due to the several advantages of using Linux over NT or other UNIX variants, Linux may be your main desktop platform.

Linux provides a better multi-user PC environment than NT.

Due to the X Windows and environment and the UNIX heritage of Linux, Linux is designed to handle several users simultaneously on the same PC. NT can also provide this, but not as inexpensively, simply, or reliably (in my opinion). We have tens of Linux machines, some in a 16-node Linux cluster of dual processor Pentium III machines, and Linux provides us a good way of allowing multiple users to utilize these machines.

The speed of the tools on inexpensive PCs are very good, even when compared to large (expensive) UNIX workstations.

Now that PCs can have 1 GB or more of RAM, it is quite feasible to use PCs for even the largest designs. The section Speed provides some of our experiences when it comes to the speed of the tools under Linux with Wine on a PC as compared to a dual-processor HP Workstation.

Another option, of course, would be to run VMWare instead of Wine under Linux. The tools should run faithfully under Linux in that scenario, but this approach, of course, costs more (Wine is free while VMWare isn't) and I would expect VMWare to require more resources and overhead than running Wine, meaning the command-line tools might run faster under Wine.

fixme:win32:PE_LoadImage FATAL: Need to relocate
c:\temp\something.exe, but no relocation records present
(stripped during link). Try to run that file directly !

With version 2.1i, the installer is Java-based, which should make things easier, but it didn't. So, as an alternative, I installed under NT, used tar to consolidate the installation directory into a single file, grabbed the Xilinx entries for the NT registry and all appears to be well. I also tried directly using jar to unpack the entire installation, but clearly some files are created or modified by the installation process since this approach did not work---the Xilinx tools complained that the installation was broken. A Java-based install method might still work, but I didn't have enough time to force the issue.

To be more specific about how to capture the Xilinx registry settings when installing under Windows, you basically use regedit to capture the entire Windows registry before the installation; for instance, you can call the registry before installation before.reg. Then, install the Xilinx tools under Windows as you normally would. Next, use regedit again to capture the entire Windows registry, naming the file something like after.reg. Now follow the process described in the README file for the regapi program that comes with Wine. The process performs essentially a "diff" of the two registries and creates a third registry file which can be merged into a Wine user's existing registry settings. Note that I believe you must execute the "registry diff" shell scripts described in the README from /usr/local/bin or whatever directory in which they are located if you want to create your own "registry diff" file; the shell scripts do not appear to be very smart about search paths for executables. We will discuss how to use this "registry diff" below.

Note that as you apply Service Packs to your Xilinx installation under Windows, you might need to perform this same "registry diff" process described above to maintain the same registry settings under Wine. It has been our experience that the Service Packs do not make any significant changes to the registry settings, meaning that we haven't had to do anything to our Wine registries to run the new Service Packs.

• The Xilinx tools were installed in G:\Xilinx-2.1i under Windows.
• The Xilinx distribution is located in /usr/local/cad/Xilinx-2.1i under Linux.
• The "registry diff" file that was created above is called xilinx.reg.toAdd.

With this said, I recommend the following for your Wine setup:

1. Make sure you include /usr/local/bin or where ever the wine binary for Linux resides in your $path or $PATH environment variable.
2. Create a reasonable ~/.winerc file which has [Drive G] set to point to /usr/local/cad. This .winerc file can be used as a template. You can change the references to the home directory (/home/grahamp) with a reference to your home directory. I have chosen [Drive G] to be the place for the Xilinx tools, but this can be mapped differently if you modify the registry entries appropriately.
3. For the directory you choose to be [Drive C] in your .winerc file, make a subdirectory in that directory called windows and another called windows/system. These are needed by the emulator but you don't have to put anything in the directories yourself. For instance, if I defined [Drive C] to be /home/grahamp/wine-c, then I would need to create both /home/grahamp/wine-c/windows and /home/grahamp/wine-c/windows/system.
4. Set up your Wine registry entries for the Alliance 2.1i tools. You can do this via one of two methods.
   1. Copy the following system.reg and user.reg into your ~/.wine directory (you may have to create this directory if you haven't run Wine before). Then, you will have to modify the RegCDKey and RegSerial fields in the system.reg to your CD Key and Serial numbers for the installation to work. You may also want to modify RegCompany and RegOwner, though, it isn't necessary. If you didn't install the Xilinx tools in G:\Xilinx-2.1i, you probably should modify the paths found in both registry files. This method may work for you, but is not guaranteed. Once you have established a good "system.reg" and "user.reg" at your site, though, other users should be able to use the same registry files.
   2. Or, use your existing Wine registry settings and merge the Xilinx Alliance 2.1i registry settings into those. This can be done using the regapi command and accompanying shell scripts from the standard Wine distribution (programs/regapi), which can probably be found in /usr/local/bin, if they are fully installed. For instance, if you use my Xilinx registry settings, xilinx.reg.toAdd, you can merge in the new registry settings using:

      	    /usr/local/bin/regapi -force setValue < xilinx.reg.toAdd
      	    

      The -force option forces the registry settings to be updated even if they already exist. Note that xilinx.reg.toAdd must be modified to reflect your own Serial Number and CD Key. If you created your own "registry diff" file, as described in Capturing a Xilinx Install to Work with Linux above, you can use this file instead of my xilinx.reg.toAdd. As I mentioned above, I believe you must execute the "registry diff" shell scripts from where ever they are installed (they are not very smart about paths) if you want to create your own xilinx.reg.toAdd. Also, I believe regapi must be run from a directory or subdirectory known to Wine and you must have a valid Wine setup (~/.winerc, etc.). For further information, check out the README.regapi file which comes with the standard wine distribution in the programs/regapi subdirectory.
5. Set the XILINX environment variable to "G:\Xilinx-2.1i according to your shell:
   • For sh and its derivatives:

     	    XILINX="G:\Xilinx-2.1i";export XILINX
     	    

   • For csh and its derivatives:

     	    setenv XILINX "G:\Xilinx-2.1i"
     	    

6. Set your DISPLAY environment variable appropriately. Even if you are only using command-line tools, Wine still needs to connect to your display. I am not aware of a way around this; if you find a way around this, please let me know.

Executing a Program

     wine ngdbuild

     wine "fpga_editor pe1_Counters.par.ncd"

     wine -managed "fpga_editor pe1_Counters.par.ncd"

In executing programs, you might have to deal with the mixing of UNIX and Windows-style paths. Wine itself doesn't mind commands like

     wine /usr/local/cad/Xilinx-2.1i/bin/nt/ngdbuild

Caveats, Strange Behavior, and Workarounds

err:win32:DeleteCriticalSection Deleting owned critical section (0x40ec0ab4)
err:win32:DeleteCriticalSection Deleting owned critical section (0x40ec0a54)
err:win32:DeleteCriticalSection Deleting owned critical section (0x40ec09f4)
err:win32:DeleteCriticalSection Deleting owned critical section (0x40ec0994)
err:win32:DeleteCriticalSection Deleting owned critical section (0x78040e88)

fixme:console:SetConsoleCtrlHandler (0x7800dd30,1) - no error checking or testing yet

The big shortcoming of using Wine to execute the Xilinx tools under Linux is that Wine cannot currently spawn other Windows programs in the Wine environment. What this means is that for programs like ngdbuild and map which call other programs, you will have to execute these other programs explicitly. For instance, with the Wildforce environment, there are a few XNF drop-ins or subdesigns. In this case, ngdbuild tries to spawn xnf2ngd to translate those files. Since I use Makefiles to process my design files, I just execute xnf2ngd, edif2ngd, and the other translators explicitly before calling ngdbuild. Note that your main design file must be translated as well as drop-ins or other subdesigns before executing ngdbuild.

I have noticed that map actually calls m1map for XC4000 designs, while it doesn't for Virtex. In converting my UNIX Makefiles to handle the Wine environment, I have replaced references to map with m1map for XC4000 designs and had no problems. For Virtex designs, map should be used as usual.

One small problem that I discovered with bitgen is that it writes out file names which only have lower case letters, even if the original design's file name had some capital letters. Of course, in Windows, this is not a problem since the tools tend to be case insensitive when it comes to file names. Under Linux, though, this complicates "make" files, but it can be handled fairly easily if you know of the problem beforehand.

As a reminder, it is also worth noting that the text files created by Wine are Windows/DOS text files, meaning that they have "\r" characters at the end of each text line. These can be converted to UNIX-style text files by simply executing:

tr -d "\r" < windows.file.txt > unix.file.txt

• Make a link at the top level of the emulated Windows drive to the file of interest and select the link via the File->Open dialog.
• Go to the directory where the .ncd file is and execute

        wine "fpga_editor mydesign.ncd"
        

  where mydesign.ncd is the name of the .ncd file you want to view. Basically, a command-line option to fpga_editor appears to work if the file is in the local directory.

Also, when running fpga_editor, you will notice errors and messages such as:

fixme:mdi:MDIRefreshMenu partially function stub
err:heap:HeapValidate Heap 41700000: block ffffffff is not inside heap

Considering the problem with not being able to spawn other Windows programs in the Wine environment, don't expect the dsgnmgr to work at all.

Linux PII 333 (All files retrieved over NFS) 
1.480u 3.090s 5:51.61 1.2%      0+0k 0+0io 7394pf+0w
              -------

Linux PIII 500 (All files retrieved over NFS) 
0.940u 3.010s 5:24.94 1.2%      0+0k 0+0io 7372pf+0w
              -------

HP-UX J2240 (local design files) 
190.30u 10.15s 4:09.03 80.4%
               -------

Linux PII 333 (local design files) 
1.600u 2.840s 2:56.70 2.5%      0+0k 0+0io 7394pf+0w
              -------

Linux PIII 500 (local design files) 
1.020u 2.910s 1:53.01 3.4%      0+0k 0+0io 7372pf+0w
              -------

Here are some comparisons provided by other members of the lab on much larger designs:

Design: CDI (Virtex)

HP-UX J2240 (All local files), no (default?) effort level:
1 hr. 37 min.

Linux PIII 500 (local design files), no (default?) effort level:
17 min.

HP-UX J2240, highest effort level, 2 delay/2 clean-up passes:
approx. 30 hrs.

Linux PIII 500 (local design files), highest effort, 2 delay/2 clean-up passes:
29 min. 18 sec.


Design: Superquant, XC4085
Linux PIII 500
76.170u 832.670s 42:33:38.53 0.5%       0+0k 0+0io 7422pf+0w
                 -----------

HP-UX J2240
346142.79u 338.91s 97:17:38.16 0.8%
                   -----------