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More Xilinx S/W problems... ISE won't start

I installed SP3 for ISE 8.1 (webpack) yesterday and used it for a bit.

I then ran a multi-pass P&R, then, when it was done, killed the program and shut down my computer. When I started up today, ISE won't run. I get the start-up windows, but it appears to hang with the process _pn.exe running. Windows task manager reports that "Xilinx - ISE" is "Not Responding".

Anyone else run into this?

Is it just me, or does the Xilinx s/w appear to be getting worse? The user interface on 8.1 seems very slow when compared to 6.1. XST takes a lot longer than it used to. If it weren't for the updated speed files, I'd go back to 6.1 in a heart beat.

John Providenza

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johnp
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I found a work-around - I delete the bulk of the files from my working directory including the .ise file and now ISE starts up. I copied in an older 6.1 .npl file and told ISE to convert it to the newer 8.1 project file.

John Providenza

Reply to
johnp

John,

You will now spend most of your time creating "workarounds" for Xilinx

8.1.

I finally gave up and went back to 6.3 yesterday.

Various 8.1 problems I have seen:

  1. The "humongous project file bug"--in this one, your ise project grows to perhaps gigabytes in size, takes forever (20-30 minutes) to load and then doesn't work. The "workaround" is to blow away the project file and start over. Hmm . . . why am I doing this again? This appears to be fixed by service pack 3.

  1. Coregen doesn't run--crashes and wants to talk with Microsoft. This is better in service pack 3--at least I could run it from the gui, although it still crashed if I tried to run it separately.

  2. The "multipass par fools you" bug. In this one, you run a multipass, find a seed that gives good results, copy the files back, then run par only to find that the timing is now awful.

  1. The "can't really run these apps" bug. I normally use my own control app to run the tools from the command line, parse the error file and use timingan.exe if necessary. Now timingan.exe won't run--nothing happens. Still runs if I execute it from the ISE gui. The same is true--at times--of all the gui apps like fpga_editor.exe and such. They won't even run from Windows Explorer--brief hourglass, then nothing. No log files, nothing. They still run from the gui.

  2. The "oops the bitfile is too big" bug. Run fpga_editor independently (when it works), define probes, generate bitfile from the probes dialog. The bitfile for a 2vp30 is now 35 bytes too long and won't load properly. Run fpga_editor from the gui, do the same thing and all is well.

  1. The "can't do anything even in the gui" bug. In this one, you can't run any processes anywhere. The ISE gui runs, but if you try to run a process (map, par, whatever), all the wheels spin briefly, then show errors for the process, but no log files are created. Forcing run with "rerun" doesn't work--nothing works. The "workaround" is again to blow away the project file.

Bottom line is that even after three (3!) service packs, the 8.1 tools are unusable for real work. It was taking me most of a day to discover the next "workaround" so I could build bits when it should take an hour. After struggling to get timing closure on Friday, I gave up, went back to 6.3, ran multipass and had perfect timing bits in an hour and a half.

We are looking at upgrading our board to use a Virtex-4, but that may require using version 8 of the tools and I think we'll evaulate Altera seriously now--at least then maybe I could get some work done.

Terry Brown

Reply to
Terry Brown

I've been running into a similar problem recently. For me, ISE would freeze after the prompt that asked if I wanted to unlocked the project file, or would just never load (and eat up 99% of the CPU).

It seems to work if I replace the .ise file with a backed-up .ise file, then actually delete the .lock file before starting up ISE. From browsing Xilinx support it looks like there may be issues with ISE corrupting the .ise file on a crash. I'd recommend keeping your own backup (NOT the automatic backup) of the .ise file. Wonder why could they didn't just keep the project file a simple ASCII file like the old .npl?

I agree that ISE stability has gone downhill. Altera had a lot of customers defect after their first buggy Quartus tools--Xilinx should take note.

Brian Walkington

Reply to
briwalk

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