Electronic_Design_Automation

Overview

Gentoo Linux lets you have the latest "bleeding edge" in Linux. However, most of the EDA tools would like you to run them on a more "corporate" version of Linux such as RedHat Enterprise or Suse Linux.

After having some issues running Synplify and Mentor Precision RTL on my Gentoo Box (due to the the very latest libraries, etc.), following are the small tweaks that got things working smoothly.

Fixing glibc

You may get some errors about libc.so.6 or some undefined symbol errno in the glibc libraries. I had problems both with Mentor Graphics Precision RTL and Synplify Pro.

They both had problems with the latest glibc libraries.

The trick from this Gentoo expert is to recompile glibc with the compatibility flag.

In /etc/portage/package.use set

 sys-libs/glibc glibc-compat20 -nptlonly

Then you need to rebuild glibc (emerge glibc). Note that this takes quite a while. Since glibc is used by many programs, there could be some programs that can be affected by the -nptlonly switch. You should try this on some test workstation if you are in a production environment.

Using the tools

Mentor Graphics Precision RTL

Install as directed. You can safely ignore the warnings that you are using an unsupported operating system.

Start as usual after setting up the license server. In my configuration (university environment), simply export the LM_LICENSE_FILE:

 export LM_LICENSE_FILE=<PORT>@<SERVER>

Synplify Pro

Their installer has quite a few glitches and prints out some garbage when installing in Gentoo. However, it only affects the script detecting the operating system and version. If you ignore the warnings, the tool installs properly.

Then, you need to have the tool's binaries in your path and setup the license file.

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/synplify
export LM_LICENSE_FILE=<PORT>@<SERVER>
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 synplify_pro

In some instances, you would need to run synplify instead of synplify_pro. That depends on your license.

Xilinx ISE

Installs and runs correctly on a 32-bit Gentoo installation. I had problems running the hardware interface (Parallel JTAG download cable) in a 64-bit Linux installation.

This howto describes the process for a complete installation, including a lot of fixes. I don't recall needing much changes to my installation, so things may have improved with the ISE and Foundation installations since I tried those.

Altera Quartus II

Installs and runs fine on a 32-bit and 64-bit Gentoo installation. I had to tweak things a bit to get the USB-Blaster to work with my setup.

Mentor Graphics Modelsim

Installs and runs fine.

export LM_LICENSE_FILE=<PORT>@<SERVER>
vsim&