virtualbox.org

Boy this is a shot in the dark. Due to our legacy company product being designed on Xilinx ISE 10.1, I am forced to use a 32 bit OS to run Xilinx ISE software for enhancements (my development PC is 64 bit Win 7 so 10.1 will NOT run on it). So I am running Win7 32 in a VB environment and running Xilinx ISE 10.1 on it. Everything is great, I can develop for our legacy product... EXCEPT.

I cannot use the USB parallel IV cable to load firmware on our design through IMPACT nor can I use Chipscope to debug.

To solve the problem, I have read multiple entries on the internet, instructing me to set up two USB filters for my VB:

Name: Xilinx no firmware
Vendor: 03fd
Product ID: 000f
Remote: no or any

Name: Xilinx
Vendor: 03fd
Product ID: 0008
Remote: no or any

I have done that. When I plug in the USB cable, I can see the windows notification display in the guest OS say "This device can run faster..." which is good! I can see the Xilinx cable come up in device manager on the guest OS. Which is also good! When I check Devices on the Virtual Machine settings, I see XILINX - again good, good good!

But when I start impact, and attempt to make a connection, the connection times out in seconds and I get "Could not find cable! Check cable setup!"

Very frustrating. Again the guest OS is Windows 7 32 bit. Xilinx 10.1sp1, VB version 4.2.18 r88780

I don't know if this is a virtualbox snafoo or Xilinx. My guess is Xilinx, as their software is horrifically known to be single platform specific. I've even reinstalled the Jungo usb drivers. No dice.

if anyone has solved this please share whatever you've found. Xilinx wants nothing to do with this. Their strategy is to back away from their software at all costs.

Is this USB adapter designed for the purpose, or is it sold as a printer adapter?

If the latter: the PC sees only the USB interface, it can't control the signals like it can on a real parallel port, and that means no special tricks - e.g. no JTAG wiggler.

IMHO: these parallel trickster devices never worked well even in the physical world, so it's unlikely that a VM will provide you with a "get out of jail free" card. The better solution would be to find a modern way to program whatever it is (an FPGA?). Good luck, as I know from experience that the people making these tools are horribly behind the times, and the ones that aren't will charge extortionate prices.

Or: dual boot XP-32 with Win7-64. I wouldn't have thought embedded development needed a 64bit host anyway. Quite the contrary.

p.s. The "This device can run faster" notification isn't good news. It implies that you have a USB2 device plugged into a (virtual) USB1 port. Install the extension pack to enable USB2 support, and remember to enable it in the VM settings.