Hi all,
This is my first post and I am pretty much brand new to virtual machines. I have a quick question and I doubt there is a solution, but here it goes.
I currently have a Windows 7 Ultimate x64 host running Ubuntu 9.10 x64 in a Virtual Machine. Everything is working exactly as expected :-). I miss using Linux, but a lot of my recent work has pretty much forced me to use Windows.
Anyway, what I would like to do is call a program that is installed on my Windows 7 host and operate on files on my virtual Linux machine. I know this sounds strange, but let me try to explain as what I am hoping to do is nothing malicious. I am a hardware engineer and use a program called Modelsim to simulate hardware designs written in languages like Verilog and VHDL. My version of Modelsim is Modelsim PE. I do not have the ability to run this particular version under Linux as it does not exist (I know others do, but I am not licensed to use them). I also use a program called Xilinx ISE. This allows me to build FPGA designs based on my simulated code. Now here's the tricky part.
I want to use the 64 bit version of ISE and its partner program EDK, but EDK is not available as a 64 bit Windows application. Moreover, by many accounts, Xilinx's tools simply work better under Linux. Where I run into a problem is that all of the simulation models for Xilinx's primitives need to be compiled so that I can run some simulations that use these primitives. Normally, I run a program called "compxlib" to compile all of this stuff. My problem is that my simulator is in the Windows domain and I know of no way to call that from my Linux VM. Please be aware that the code that is compiled is not an executable targeted for some processor ... it's more like a proprietary code Modelsim uses to perform simulations.
If I could get this to work, I'd be in heaven as its like having the best of both worlds ... Linux has so many tools I love using. I know I can get some of them by running Cygwin, but that actually messes with Xilinx's EDK as it relies on a stripped down version of Cygwin to compile stuff for both hard and soft core processors embedded in FPGAs.
Is there a way to do this? I tried installing my Modelsim under Wine, but even if that worked, I doubt my licensing dongle would work. What scares me is that I had read an old article where someone was trying to do what I want to do for malicious purposes and I fear the functionality I need might not be available. However, if this can be done, please let me know as it would be EXTREMELY useful.
Thanks! And I hope I can contribute something somday!!!
Ed
