downgrading RHEL to support IC 5141

 Hi,

It looks like IC 5141 works somhow with RH5 for us (we do not use this very often). The newest IC615 has official support for RH6 but we had problems with some PDKs.

You can always use virtualization which works qiute nice.

 Regards

In practice IC5141 works fine on RHEL5 (and indeed RHEL6 - I'm running RHEL6.1 on my laptop), with cdsdoc being pretty much the only thing that doesn't work (and we have a solution to hack cdsdoc to make it work). However, that doesn't imply support - we don't test on RHEL5...

That said, there are no new ISRs for IC5141 - the last was from November 2011, so "support" is rather a moot point anyway!

Our general advice is to run RHEL4 in a virtual machine - running an older OS in a virtual machine (e.g. VMware or VirtualBox or similar) should be relatively straightforward and isolate you from the hardware - the drivers for the hardware are then taken care of by the host system.

As for IC615, we support RHEL6 from IC615 ISR12 onwards. There were some issues with running virtuoso in 64 bit mode on RHEL6 which were fixed in ISR12, allowing us to state that it is now supported (it is being tested on RHEL6 too). The patch data files for checkSysConf haven't been updated yet, but that will be happening soon.

Regards,

Andrew.

 Hello,

Dear Andrew,

Related to this update for IC615 you are talking about (ISR12), Are you talking about the hotfix IC6.1.5.500.1.2?

I checked online, and its size was around 7gb. Is this hotfix going to update all of the base cadence files installed on my system? Would I need to redo all the setting that I have done for the base Cadence installations or this hotfix will not effect the settings of my current installation and it would simply update the files?

 
Regards

Sohaib 

Sohaib,

It's IC6.1.5.500.12 (not .1.2), yes.

You can either choose to install it with installScape in a new location, or you can update your existing installation. I don't know what "settings" you've done - in general you shouldn't edit much in a Cadence installation - maybe add <ICinstDir>/tools/dfII/local - so all I would expect you should need to do is copy that to a new installation. If you update your existing installation, it will not erase that directory though.

Andrew.

This is a single workstation which will hold the license file and any VM would be installed on it.Let's say I keep the base RHEL 6 and install 1-2 VM to support PDK and IC versions. I apreciate this as the safe and approved path and I have some questions. 

The license server can't run on a VM. How do I get the base OS let the VM access the license? I'm thinking of using VirtualBox, has anyone done this and was it a seamless part of the install or was further configuration needed?

Does anyone have experience with performance hit due to serving license from base operating system of same hardware? I've seen another thread on installing VM but not a consensus.

Anyone running 2 VM to support 2 different PDK/IC together with license server on the same base machine? 

I'm getting a different, unofficial recommendation from elsewhere to go with RHEL 5 as the base OS. Apparently no one is having issues with IC 5141 in RHEL 5 except for with cdnsdoc. Would Cadence refuse to provide support if running IC 5141 on RHEL 5? I guess we could still test any issues that did come up with a VM RHEL 4 test environment if necessary.

Thanks, all, for sharing your expertise on this!

Not really sure why you'd need more than one virtual machine - you can use multiple PDKs and IC versions on a single machine or on a single virtual machine.

Generally a guest VM can see the host - usually by the hostname of the host, provided that it is set up correctly. For example, there's no reason why your guest VM should not be able to access the hosts map via LDAP, if that's how you're doing it in general. Depending on the VM you use, you can set up the guest to be either NATed (and effectively appear on a private network), or in bridge mode and appear as another machine on the same subnet as the host (this is possible with both VMware and VirtualBox).

There should be no performance hit with running the license server on the base operating system - the performance of a license server is generally not critical unless it is serving a very large number of license clients - the bigger impact will be the performance of the virtual machine itself - and usually that's just a matter of ensuring that it has been allocated sufficient memory.

I also suggested that running RHEL5 should work, but not be supported (see my post earlier in the thread where I explain about support) - I work for Cadence. Note that "support" is somewhat a moot point with IC5141 because hotfixes have stopped (after all, it was released 8 years ago).

I regularly use a VMware virtual host to run Cadence tools (although most of the time I'm running natively, and have a VMware machine with Windows 7 or Windows XP on it), and also use VirtualBox at home to run a guest Fedora VM on a Windows 7 host (this was straightforward to set up and install, but I don't run Cadence tools on it, as it's for personal use). I've not tried installing VMware myself.

Regards,

Andrew.

Thanks Andrew! This is a big help especially on the networking. 

The base OS on most systems shipping with Red Hat is now RHEL6. Even the foundries with kits that run on IC 6 don't necessarily support IC 615 ISR12, since this is the latest and greatest. So, two VM is for two PDK one with IC 514 (RHEL4) and one with IC 613 (RHEL5). I'm reluctant to remove the RHEL6 since it's coming soon. 

Now, I was asking for more information about the implications of "not supported."Yes, extremely helpful that you work for Cadence even.

If the designers can't get support for basic simulation questions because of using RHEL5, then I would think it's too risky. I mean, we submit that the simulation won't converge for example because itol is not set correctly. And, the SR gets autoclosed because of wrong OS. That would be not cool. 

But, if not supported meant that if there is something obviously OS related like a simulation crashes with lib.so.X11 or something then the help ticket gets closed until we test on supported OS. That would be palatable,

Would it be the former or the latter? 

Cheers,

Marion

Marion,

IC613 should also run on RHEL4, so I don't think you necessarily need an RHEL5 VM.

Nothing gets auto-closed because of the wrong OS. Simulation convergence problems and usage questions would be dealt with as it's almost certainly nothing to do with the OS being used. And anyway, recent versions of MMSIM require you to be using RHEL5 or later (so that might be another reason for running IC5141 on an "unsupported" OS - because otherwise if you want to use IC5141 with MMSIM10.1 you'd have to use remote simulation so you could run both on a supported OS (icfb on your RHEL4 VM, and MMSIM on the physical host, maybe).