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Magical Mystery Tour of ISE environment variables

Hi *,

I keep coming across answer records and script files containing the setting of undocumented environment variables, such as XIL_ROUTE_ENABLE_DATA_CAPTURE, XIL_BITGEN_VIRTEX2ES, XIL_XST_HIDEMESSAGES and so on.

Is there a complete list of these hidden cheat codes? Any "official" documentation at all?

Whenever I'm stuck in a design, and find out that some magical environment variable just fixes my problem, I wonder if maybe there is something like the Holy Grail... something like the "Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything", as in a "XIL_MAKE_EVERYTHING_WORK"- or "XIL_42"-variable or something. Haven't found it but thought I could ask.

cu, Sean

Reply to
Sean Durkin
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One first step to know about all variables:

607 hits! Also some are error messages... 
--
Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik  Schlossgartenstrasse 9  64289 Darmstadt
--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------
Reply to
Uwe Bonnes

Not bad! Should've thought about that...

Looks like the variable I'm supposed to set doesn't even exist in ISE6.3, even more fun... ;)

cu, Sean

Reply to
Sean Durkin

Some of these variables come and do go. Usually it comes in as a quick fix then gets properly incorporated into the tools on the next release. When incorporated they support gets dropped. It can be a pain to script lovers but as I am not one of those I don't usually find this as an issue.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of MINI-CAN. CAN Bus Development Board.

formatting link

Reply to
John Adair

XIL_XST_HIDEMESSAGES is supposed to suppress the warnings that cause my report files to grow to several tens of thousands of lines long... IT DOESN'T WORK!

-Jim

Reply to
Jim George

No help for you Sean, just a small rant:

I've never understood this approach to things - it makes version control a bit of a nightmare! Surely there's a better way, even if it's a file called enable-budges.txt in the project directory!

Cheers, Martin

--
martin.j.thompson@trw.com
TRW Conekt, Solihull, UK
http://www.trw.com/conekt
Reply to
Martin Thompson

Don't forget the PAR_ and PL_ variables!

I'm with Martin on this one... there is really no excuse for them using environment variables. In fact, I've complained about it, exactly for source control reasons. The two main responses I got:

  1. Something along the lines of "variables are used on a temporary basis for ES parts, or for bugs that will be fixed in the next SW release" - which completely ignores the source control issue, and the fact that some of their customers may be stuck using or supporting ES parts forever, or unable to upgrade to the next SW release.
  2. Something like that it was "difficult" to pass the variables read from a UCF file from one program to the next. I was flabbergasted by that response - there are so many different ways this could be done. Not only that, but Xilinx already does it with the CONFIG_STEPPING variable, that you can put in your UCF!

This ranks right up there with the binary project file they've just introduced.

Marc

Reply to
Marc Randolph

I'm using XIL_XST_HIDEMESSAGES with 6.1i and it works fine. You just can't pick which messages it hides. One thing I noticed was that I usually need to add these variables to the user environment because for some reason they are not always picked up by the tools when placed in the system environment.

-Gabor

Reply to
Gabor

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