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 @@ -43,14 +43,24 @@ 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, the presence of "windrvr6" + is recognized again. Support for parallel/ftdi-cables is currently limited to existing parallel ports only. So you can't use an ftdi-emulated cable on a non-existing parallel port. Using it on a physically present port still works.