IC610 vs Linux

Hello all,

I recently installed RHEL 5 with the intent to install IC610. However,
lo and behold, I found out that IC610 is recommended for RHEL4 or
RHEL3 for a x86-32bit machine. (I had hoped that RHEL5 will be
backwards compatible). Anyways, after some googling I came to the
conclusion that I have to install RHEL 4 or Centos 5 (or some othe
Linux distro), after of course I remove RHEL5. Since I do not
particurlaly enjoy installing/deinstalling OSes, I was wondering if
anyone can recommend which linux distro is best compatible with
IC610.

Thank you
-Roger

 

RHEL5 usually is backward compatible, unless Cadence did something ugly. Have you tried (I haven't - all the people here still use 5.1.41)? Cadence seems to be very conservative with Linux OSes, I have had this problem several times. I install the newest Linux, since we frequently update the hardware of our CAD workstations (get faster new machines), and old Linux distributions just don't work on new mainboards (RHEL3 is what? 2003? No sane person should work on a workstation from 2003 today!). Sometimes you just need a shared library from one of the old distributions.

 

According to the cadence web site:
http://www.cadence.com/rl/Resources/release_info/Supported_Platforms_Matrix..pdf
IC610 is supported by RHEL3 and RHEL4, not RHEL5.
But no, I haven't tried to install it on RHEL5. I am currently
downloading CentOS 5.

-Roger

 

According to cadence web site:
http://www.cadence.com/rl/Resources/release_info/Supported_Platforms_Matrix.pdf
IC610 is supported only by RHEL3 or RHEL4.

But no, I haven't tried installing it on RHEL5. I am currently
downloading CentOS 5.

-Roger

 

Roger Bourne wrote, on 11/25/08 14:53:

I can't work out why you are concerned about using RHEL5, and instead want to go
to using a _completely_ unsupported distro, CentOS! (yes, I know it should be
compatible, but even so...)

I have been using RHEL5 for more than a year (admittedly the 64 bit OS), using a
wide range of Cadence tools (even those not officially supported on RHEL5). I'd
be very surprised if you have problems with RHEL5 32bit with IC61.

Note we have to be fairly conservative, because:

a) we have to build on platforms that will be upwards compatible for lots of
customers
b) there is a finite amount of testing of distributions that can be
practically done. So we pick those distros agreed amongst the EDA
industry (there's a link about this on the platform support pages
on the main Cadence web site).

Regards,

Andrew.

 

Indeedy, but "officially supported" != "runs just fine".

Running IC612 (and IC5141, FWIW) on RHEL5 here, no problem.

*Sometimes* (and I don't remember if this happened on IC610/IC612
or not), there is a problem where the installation process itself
wants
to be on a particular OS version. But the actual installed apps are
pretty forgiving.

And I've never had Cadence give me grief on a service call for
running a reasonable (but higher than officially supported) OS rev.

-Jay-

 

I remember that IC 5.0.33 was compiled against a 10 year old libc version,
and SuSE 10 discontinued to support this particular outdated interface (I
discovered this during the test phase of SLED 10, i.e. with OpenSuse, and
reported it to Cadence). I think this was overdoing being compatible, even
though IC 5.0.33 was EOL. At least the build platform should be supported by
the vendor ;-).

Actually, trying to start up icfb takes about 10 seconds on a decent
machine, and having 10 or 20 installs around (can be virtual machines) and
just try that is IMHO not too much effort. Most compatibility problems
already occur on startup - at least that's my experience. When I can start
up icfb/virtuoso, it runs. Most Linuxes are fairly compatible to each
others, as there are only three main branches: RedHat, Suse, and Debian.
Testing on the community versions such as Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian
Testing and Ubuntu is worth the time, because what's done there will end

 

But is surely not enough to state anything publicly about compatibility or
support.

Yours,

 

I'm doing free software development as a hobby. Trust me, we have way more
supported platforms than Cadence, and our build process is non-trivial (we
always run into GCC bugs nobody else finds). "Supported" for us means: When
we build a distribution, we build it on the platform, and run the automated
test suite. When somebody has a problem, we have access to this platform,
and can find out what the problem is. That's "supported platforms", those
are platforms where we can *provide support*. The other thing would be
"recommended platforms", that's what we use ourselves daily, and where we
know that it works. The set of "recommended platforms" is much more limited.
Fortunately, for a community project, "recommended platform" usually means
"we have found a volunteer who uses the platform and reports+fixes problems
by himself". Cadence is not a community project, so a wide variety of
recommended platforms is off limits.

Last time I had a problem with Cadence (IC 5.0.33 didn't start up under
OpenSuSE 10.0), the response was "We don't try community platforms, we wait
for SLED 10, and then wait another year until we claim support - and by
then, 5.0.33 has reached EOL". I try community platforms, because I want to
know the problems with the enterprise platforms that build upon those way
before they hit the designers. I expect you to do the same. And we
absolutely need recent distributions, because we use recent hardware. RHEL 3
stopped supporting new hardware in 2006. Have fun installing it on a Core i7
in the next quarter ;-).

 

Thanks to all for the info.

P.S Got IC610 working on RHEL5 without a hitch! Thanks again. (Was not
really in the mood to uninstall, reinstall the OS)

-Roger