Migrating from ISE to Vivado (Part 1)

I am in the process of attempting to migrate C65GS development from Xilinx's old ISE development environment to their new Vivado.  The promise is a much better synthesis tool chain, with shorter synthesis times, better timing, and it should be easier to describe timing constraints which are a black art in ISE.

Vivado is only a couple of years old, which means that it is still quite unstable as these things go.

Just getting it to install can be interesting.

After downloading the 4.8GB (!) tarball, extracting it and running the xsetup program, it got stuck showing just the splash startup window.

Fortunately I was able to find the solution in the following thread:

http://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Installation-and-Licensing/Vivado-hangs-forever-with-white-window-during-startup-Linux/td-p/479058

Basically it boils down to setting the following shell variable, ideally in your .bashrc or similar ( don't forget to log out and in again or source the file for it to take effect after you have changed it).

export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1

I am unable to comment on why this works, but simply confirm that it lets me at least see the installer.

Now to see if installation works ...