Anybody got Microsemi/Actel Libero SoC 11.0 SP1 to work on l

[Svenn Are Bjerkem]

Hi,

Installation of 11.0Beta (the first complete download of Libero SoC 11.0) is ok and runs. When downloading and applying the SPA patch or SP1 patch, libero_bin exits with a missing symbol in a dynamic library.

I note that in my installation a binary diff between the libero_bin of the various patch levels does not indicate a change. There is, however, a change in one of the dynamic libraries, libappipc.so, included with Libero SoC 11.0. Most of the api changes were pure types, so I binary-patched the libero_bin file myself and managed to get Libero SoC SP1 to run a bit longer. In the end I had to give up on a function which had had an extra argument added in SP1.

Microsemi seems to only support RHEL 5.4 and I use Debian Sid. I managed to get Libero 10.1 and the initial 11.0Beta running, so it is not that it doesn't run on Debian. I think Microsemi has forgotten to include changes to libero_bin in their SPA and SP1 patches, but before I trigger a support case on an unsupported operating system, I wanted to see if anybody here has Libero SoC up and running on Linux.

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Svenn

 

[Svenn Are Bjerkem]

Took the hassle to download a CentOS 5.6 image from virtualboxes.org and install Libero SoC 11Beta and upgrade to SP1 inside that virtualbox. First thing I noted was that 'patch' did not complain about an invalid RTP file when patching to SP1.

Then I packed the whole Libero_v11Beta directory and transferred it to Debian.

Works.

Need to note that Libero SoC is very much hardwired to RHEL in some script files in Libero/bin and Synplify/bin, but it is possible to fix this in an editor.

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Svenn

 

[HT-Lab]

On 14/03/2013 12:56, Svenn Are Bjerkem wrote:

Took the hassle to download a CentOS 5.6 image from virtualboxes.org and install Libero SoC 11Beta and upgrade to SP1 inside that virtualbox. First thing I noted was that 'patch' did not complain about an invalid RTP file when patching to SP1.

Then I packed the whole Libero_v11Beta directory and transferred it to Debian.

Works.

Need to note that Libero SoC is very much hardwired to RHEL in some script files in Libero/bin and Synplify/bin, but it is possible to fix this in an editor.

Interesting, that was the same method I used to get Precision installed

on my Gentoo box. Many tools and updates later I gave up and like you
installed CentOS. If you want to use EDA tools under Linux than you can
save yourself a lot of hacking by using one of the Redhat clones. This
is no guarantee everything will work fine, I had to yum libXext,
libXtst, libXft and ncurses just to get the Modelsim DE installer to run
under Centos 6.1 but at least the procedure was simple and all other
tools (so far) installed without an issue.

Thanks for the info,

Hans
www.ht-lab.com

 

[Svenn Are Bjerkem]

To just know a bit more what possibly went wrong, I installed Beta, SPA and SP1 into separate directories. Then I binary-diffed the libero_bin files and found that interface to the dynamic library libappipc.so had changed from Beta to SPA. Since the difference in three of four cases were just integer arguments changing to bool arguments, I could replace the letter in hexedit, and SPB would run up until creating the design. Then the fourth difference would fail as the interface to the dynamic library had gotten one more argument. I would not try to hack that in hexedit. (I had the sw SP1 running from CentOS anyway) I concluded that the RTPatch thing which Microsemi uses to upgrade the java-driven original install failed when run on Debian. RTPatch is a commercial binary patch app, and Microsemi is still using version 6 while the company offers version 10.

I tried to run RTpatch on command line to try to learn more, but without much documentation, I could not get any deeper into the problem. Installing virtualbox and CentOS VDI and then Libero SoC Sp1 on top of that, took less time than I wasted on my investigations into direct installation and upgrade.

A bigger problem is that FlashPro4 is not supported on Linux, but I guess that is what we have virtualbox for.

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Svenn