Using Xilinx USB cable on LinuxMint / Ubuntu without windvr

This post is based on information found at the Xilinx JTAG information page . Using the Xilinx JTAG usb programmer without using the proprietary windvr.o (which no longer seems to work with modern kernel’s) kernel module requires that we use the open source libusb driver. There are a number of ways to obtain the driver but I prefer to install from source. The source can be obtained by using the command shown below and as the cable driver will be installed into the /opt/xilinx directory which my normal account (patrickd) doesn’t have write permissions to (/opt/xilinx must be written to using the sudo command or I could sudo to root and install from there, I could also allow write access to the /opt/xilinx but patrickd account but I prefer not to).

patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx$ sudo git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver

Which generates the following error because git isn’t installed yet;

sudo: git: command not found

To install the Git source control system, run the following command;

patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx$ sudo apt-get install gitk git-gui
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
nautilus-actions
Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
git-core libdigest-sha1-perl liberror-perl tcl8.4 tk8.4
Suggested packages:
git-arch git-cvs git-svn git-email git-daemon-run gitweb cogito tclreadline
Recommended packages:
git-doc curl
The following NEW packages will be installed
git-core git-gui gitk libdigest-sha1-perl liberror-perl tcl8.4 tk8.4
0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 6206kB of archives.
After unpacking 14.6MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Once git is installed its time to try and reinstall the libusb driver, by running the previous command;

patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx$ sudo git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver

Which will generate the following output although the actual values may differ;

Initialized empty Git repository in /opt/xilinx/usb-driver/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 551, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (325/325), done.
Indexing 551 objects…
remote: Total 551 (delta 315), reused 417 (delta 226)
100% (551/551) done
Resolving 315 deltas…
100% (315/315) done

Change into the lib usb-driver directory then read the README file and attempt to ‘make’ or build the libusb driver;

patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx$ cd usb-driver/
patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx/usb-driver$ gedit README
patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx/usb-driver$ sudo make

Unfortunately this will generate the following set of errors;

patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx/usb-driver$ make
cc -Wall -fPIC -DUSB_DRIVER_VERSION=”\”2008-04-08 22:39:18\”” usb-driver.c parport.c config.c jtagmon.c -o libusb-driver.so -ldl -lusb -lpthread -shared
usb-driver.c:26:19: error: dlfcn.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:28:20: error: stdlib.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:29:20: error: string.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:30:20: error: unistd.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:31:19: error: fcntl.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:32:23: error: sys/types.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:33:22: error: sys/stat.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:34:22: error: sys/time.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:35:19: error: stdio.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:36:17: error: usb.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:37:20: error: signal.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:38:21: error: pthread.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:39:19: error: errno.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:40:22: error: inttypes.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:41:23: error: sys/ioctl.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:42:25: error: sys/utsname.h: No such file or directory
usb-driver.c:43:27: error: bits/wordsize.h: No such file or directory
In file included from usb-driver.c:44:
usb-driver.h:253: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘uint32_t’
usb-driver.c:47: error: ‘NULL’ undeclared here (not in a function)
usb-driver.c:52: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘*’ token
usb-driver.c:53: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘*’ token
usb-driver.c:58: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘*’ token
usb-driver.c:62: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘int_wait’
usb-driver.c: In function ‘hexdump’:
usb-driver.c:70: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘fprintf’
usb-driver.c:70: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘fprintf’
usb-driver.c:70: error: ‘stderr’ undeclared (first use in this function)
usb-driver.c:70: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
usb-driver.c:70: error: for each function it appears in.)
usb-driver.c:74: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘fprintf’

In order to build the libusb driver, the libusb-dev files are required. Fortunately these files are currently available in the Debian archives and can be installed via the following command;

patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx/usb-driver$ sudo apt-get install libusb-dev
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
nautilus-actions
Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
libc6-dev linux-libc-dev
Suggested packages:
glibc-doc manpages-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed
libc6-dev libusb-dev linux-libc-dev
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 3978kB of archives.
After unpacking 17.6MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Now to re-run the ‘make’ command;

patrickd@patrickd-desktop:/opt/xilinx/usb-driver$ sudo make
cc -Wall -fPIC -DUSB_DRIVER_VERSION=”\”2008-04-08 22:39:18\”” usb-driver.c parport.c config.c jtagmon.c -o libusb-driver.so -ldl -lusb -lpthread -shared
cc -DDEBUG -Wall -fPIC -DUSB_DRIVER_VERSION=”\”2008-04-08 22:39:18\”” usb-driver.c parport.c config.c jtagmon.c -o libusb-driver-DEBUG.so -ldl -lusb -lpthread -shared

Once the driver has been build it must be added to the environment variables, this is done by adding the following to .bashrc;

export LD_PRELOAD=/opt/xilinx/usb-driver/libusb-driver.so

Once this step has been completed the final step is to add the USB driver to the udev rules set, this is achieved by (taken from http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~listarch/microblaze-uclinux/archive/2007/03/msg00101.html );

5) Make a new udev rule set file
$ sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/50-xilinx-usb-pav.rules # a new file with
arbitrary name (“50″ is recommended)
6) paste the following into this file, and save it
ACTION==”add”, BUS==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”03fd”, MODE=”666″
7) restart udev with:
$ /etc/init.d/udev restart

Getting started with LinuxMint

After distro hopping for a number of years around most of the available popular Linux distributions including fedora, centos, redhat, kubuntu, ubuntu, archlinux, mandriva, ulteo, gentoo and even some flavours of *bsd. I’ve finally decided to settle (at least for a while 🙂 ) on LinuxMint 4.0 which is based on ubuntu but just to me appears to be a *lot* prettier 🙂

I intend to use at least part of this blog to keep track of how things progress and to document any issues that I encounter with my day to day usage.

Stay tuned.