Spartan-3E Starter Kit availability slips to December

Had an email recently to say that Memec have abandoned their S3E board & would I like an S3 board instead of the 3E board I ordered at X-Fest..... Annoying thing is I only ordered it to get the software, which they won't ship seperately. What a joke.

And the Xilinx webstore has no stock of any S3 parts either..... If I was about to start an FPGA design-in I think I'd be seriously looking at Altera right now....

Some one said Digilentinc was going to have their s3e board ready for sale in about a month.

If you use linux, then you will probably avoid using windows. Can you even do Altera development using Linux? Lots of developers using FPGA's are hobbiests and enthusiasts. Usually that == linux users. Xilinx's Linux support is excellent.

That being said, I will admit that although I managed build the xilinux_pp driver under 2.6.11&13, I can't seem to get the Webpack version of iMPACT to use it. So, I'm stuck trying to take the Xilinux created SVF file and use it to program the XCR02S on the S3BOARD via jtag. It is a shame that Xilinx went so far, did so much great work to make the webpack run under linux and then didn't spend the (comparatively small) extra effort to make the xilinx_pp driver work. I was going to start adding debugging the kernel driver to see what Webpack was trying to do but haven't had time yet.

OT: I'll go on for what it's worth here is my attempt to use the driver

-- I'm guessing I'm not making the correct /dev/ entries for iMPACT. Maybe someone else knows if this is possible?

Jeff

root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# make make -C /lib/modules/2.6.11-1-686-smp/build SUBDIRS=/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.11-1-686-smp' CC [M] /home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp/xilinx_pp.o Building modules, stage 2. MODPOST

*** Warning: "cleanup_module" [/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp/xilinx_pp.ko] undefined! *** Warning: "init_module" [/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp/xilinx_pp.ko] undefined! *** Warning: "cleanup_module" [/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp/windrvr6.ko] undefined! *** Warning: "init_module" [/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp/windrvr6.ko] undefined! LD [M] /home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp/xilinx_pp.ko make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.11-1-686-smp' root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# rmmod xilinx_pp root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# insmod ./xilinx_pp.ko root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# dmesg |tail -n 2 xilinx_pp: major 244 xilinx_pp: Xilinx parallel port driver 1.0a for kernel 2.6 root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# grep device /proc/devices Character devices: Block devices: root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# grep xil /proc/devices 244 xilinx_pp root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# (run ise; impact -- impact searches for a cable, doesn't find it)

Yes. Red Hat Linux 7.3, 8.0, and Enterprise 3.0 WS

-- Mike Treseler

I have no idea whether it works on a 2.6 kernel. But I notice you didn't mention installing the windrvr6 and xpc4drvr drivers. I believe these are needed before loading the xilinx_pp driver (at least that is what I do). In my 2.4 kernel, I have in /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

source /lib/modules/misc/install_windrvr6 windrvr6 source /lib/modules/misc/install_xpc4drvr

Well, I don't know about excellent... but it does seem to be getting somewhat better.

Isn't this something that's supposed to be coming in a future (hopefully not too far away) version of ISE?

Phil