News (2008-03-26): Xilinx has released their own drivers based on libusb with ISE Design Suite 10.1. - To use them, you need to set the environment-variable XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB to 1 - before running the tools. The driver on this page no longer needs to be preloaded if you only used - it to access USB cables. Parallel port support still seems to rely on windrvr, which can be - emulated by libusb-driver. -
When using XILINX JTAG software like Impact, Chipscope and XMD @@ -36,14 +30,51 @@ The library is called libusb-driver as it was developed to support the USB cable, but later extended to also support parallel cables.
+News +
2008-03-26: Xilinx has released their own drivers based on libusb with ISE Design Suite 10.1. + To use them, you need to set the environment-variable XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB to 1 + before running the tools. The driver on this page no longer needs to be preloaded if you only used + it to access USB cables. Parallel port support still seems to rely on windrvr, which can be + emulated by libusb-driver.
+Using 32-bit ISE 10.1 on a 64-bit platform: When using the 32-bit JTAG tools from ISE Design + Suite 10.1 on a 64-bit machine, the tools will not connect to the cable but output the following + error: Cable operation is not supported when running the 32-bit version of the application on a + 64-bit platform. + To fix this, run the tools with linux32 or preload the newest 32-bit version of + libusb-driver. This will lead the tools to believe that they are running on a 32-bit + platform and allows them to connect to the cable.
2009-05-31: ISE Design Suite 11.1 now uses Xilinx's libusb-based drivers as default, without + the need to set XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB. If you want to use this driver with ISE 11.1 for USB + cables and disable the builtin support for libusb, you now have to set XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB + to 0 (export XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB=0 or setenv XIL_IMPACT_USE_LIBUSB 0). + For parallel cables Xilinx still relies on windrvr. This library works fine with parallel cables and + ISE 11.1 with no need for windrvr.
2010-03-15: If you are using newer udev-versions (like the version included in Debian Squeeze + and Ubuntu 9.10), then the file /etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules is incompatible with this udev + version. The effect of this is that the cable-firmware gets never loaded and the cable led never lights up.
+To fix this, run the following command as root:
+ sed -i -e 's/TEMPNODE/tempnode/' -e 's/SYSFS/ATTRS/g' -e 's/BUS/SUBSYSTEMS/' /etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules
+ You may have to reboot for this change to take effect.
2010-05-22: Support for ISE 12 is now available in the driver.
2011-05-08: Support for ISE 12 is now available in the driver. A rewritten version of setup_pcusb + which works on modern distributions has been added.