Xilinx Impact Suddenly Stopped Working

[terriblefire]

Just been forced to do a Win10 Update here on 2 machines and suddenly Impact no longer starts. very odd. Can anyone else confirm?

[czietz]

Same for me. The program just hangs and needs to be terminated from the task manager. It does not only affect iMPACT but also other programs from the Xilinx ISE suite, as well. I intend to do some debugging after Christmas.

[terriblefire]

I rolled back the last 2 updates and it started working again.

[grumpyboomer]

No issues on Win 11, was just playing with TF530(I know) firmwares last night.

Edition Windows 11 Pro
Version 21H2
Installed on ‎1/‎22/‎2022
OS build 22000.1335
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22000.1335.0

[czietz]

I rolled back the last 2 updates and it started working again.

Do you have Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installed? Initial debugging shows that Xilinx software hangs at startup while trying to enumerate network shares. In particular, in my case, it hangs while enumerating the pretended \\wsl shares that give you access to the Linux file systems within WSL. That should be patchable.

[alexh]

I had to rename the file libPortabilityNOSH.dll to libPortability.dll

SmartHeap disabled (aka NOSH)

https://support.xilinx.com/s/article/62 ... uage=en_US

But that was a long time ago, not recently.

[czietz]

I had to rename the file libPortabilityNOSH.dll to libPortability.dll
SmartHeap disabled (aka NOSH)
https://support.xilinx.com/s/article/62 ... uage=en_US
But that was a long time ago, not recently.

Yes, I also had to do that when I installed Xilinx ISE on Windows 10 way back ago. In other words: I've always been running with the "NOSH" version of libPortability.dll.

[terriblefire]

I rolled back the last 2 updates and it started working again.

Do you have Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installed? Initial debugging shows that Xilinx software hangs at startup while trying to enumerate network shares. In particular, in my case, it hangs while enumerating the pretended \\wsl shares that give you access to the Linux file systems within WSL. That should be patchable.

Yes i use WSL a lot. This sounds plausible as its just hanging forever.

Yes, I also had to do that when I installed Xilinx ISE on Windows 10 way back ago. In other words: I've always been running with the "NOSH" version of libPortability.dll.

Yes this i did the moment i installed Xilinx.

[czietz]

I decided not to go down the rabbit hole of why it hangs within a Windows DLL. After all, there are other things to do on Christmas Eve :D .

Instead, using a hex editor, I patched Xilinx's libPortability.dll to cause the network share enumeration always to fail, without even calling the function that hangs. That has fixed iMPACT, the Project Navigator (IDE), and the other Xilinx programs for me. I did not observe any immediate side-effects of my patch. Presumably, there could be problems when one loads files from a network share. (I have no idea why the Xilinx software enumerates network shares in the first place.)

Replace the DLLs with the attached ones at your risk! I recommend backing up the original DLLs just in case. Note that there are separate DLLs for 32-bit (found in the "nt" directory) and 64-bit ("nt64" directory). Also note that the DLL are included multiple times in an ISE installation.

[ijor]

Personally I have more experience with Intel/Altera tools than with Xilinx ones. But I'm not sure it is a good idea to run such legacy tools with a modern OS. If I'm not mistaken, ISE doesn't even support Windows 8, let alone Win 10 or Win 11.

I prefer to run these tools under a VM. You avoid all these problem altogether.