Labview or Xilinx gets stuck during FPGA synthesizing with no error

[FilipZZZ]

I have encountered a problem compiling FPGA vi's in LabVIEW. The compilation starts fine but it gets stuck on synthesizing with "### Synthesize - XST (Synthesize - XST) ###" as the last message in the Xilinx log. It can stay like that for hours. 
Before it was working fine. Unfortunately that was several months ago so its difficult to know which event could have caused it to stop.

I am running it on our NI PXIe-8135 (8 GB ram, Windows 10 Pro 21H2) (I'm sorry about calling this the "NI PC"). The FPGA card is a PXI-7854R. Complete setup is here: 

I am using LabVIEW 2020 SP1 f1 (32-bit) with FPGA  Add-Ons as follows:

LabVIEW FPGA Compilation Tool for ISE 14.7	National Instruments	Add-Ons	2020
LabVIEW FPGA Compilation Tool for Vivado 2019.1	National Instruments	Add-Ons	2020
LabVIEW FPGA Module (32-bit) English	National Instruments	Add-Ons	2020 f1

With what I believe could be the relevant drivers: 

NI PXI Platform Services	National Instruments	Drivers	20.5.0
NI R Series Multifunction RIO	National Instruments	Drivers	20.0.0
NI-FGEN	National Instruments	Drivers	20.0.0

 
In attempt to debug this I updated to the same LabVIEW, drivers and addons versions on my laptop (Dell Mobile Precision 7540, 16 GB ram, Windows 10 Enterprise 21H2). And there the FPGA project compiles in around 4-5 minutes. It did not run (obviously) because it doesn't have the laptop doesn't have the PXI-7854R card with FPGA, but I was able to take the new bitfile and use it successfully.

After that I tried removing and reinstalling LabVIEW on the NI PXIe-8135 using the NI Package Manager but that didn't change the behavior. When I made a diff of the two Xilinx logs, they are pretty much identical up to that point where the NI PXIe-8135 stops and only on the laptop it procedes with Synthesizing:

What I remember doing on the NI PXIe-8135 since the last time it was working:
I installed some DevOps tools, specifically Jenkins (disabled now), Java, Rancher (uninstalled now). I prepared a lot of integration tests and I remember clicking yes to some NI update.

I am not aware of anything aggressive that could involve messing with the Windows Registry.

I believe not using the local compile server would solve this problem. But since I dont have access to any of the alteratives, any suggestion is appreciated.

[DGR_MARIA]

Hello, did you solved this problem ? 

Because I have more and less the same situation, but I don't know how to solve it

[FilipZZZ]

Hi, unfortunately we did not find a solution. We can either compile the files on a windows 10 laptop where it for some reason works or in a windows 7 virtual machine (windows 7 seems like the newest officially supported OS in the PXI-7854R's case 😕 ). 
Only thing we did not try is to do a fresh install of windows 10 on the NI PXIe-8135. Reinstalling of labview and other software did not help.
We are currently shifting away from NI altogether so it's not likely we will try that any time soon.

[PS_2288]

hello can I know your problem was solved because I am facing same issue in fbga 7852 R

if it was resolve please let me know how it was resolve it will helpful for me I am facing same is so last 4 to 5 days.

thank you in advance 

prashant.singh545@gmail.com

if you want to reply my mail ID please reply above mail ID

[maturben]

We have the same issue on Windows 11, Labview 22Q3, and the FPGA card PCIe7842R.

The card is still avaiable, how can this be not combatible with Windows 10/11??

Any suggestion how to overcome this issue?

[FilipZZZ]

I haven't looked into this in years but I guess the only "supported" solution is using the (paid) remote compile server. In our case we just use the old already compiled images, and can theoretically tweak them in a Windows 7 virtual machine. Other than that we keep moving towards opensource.

[maturben · Accepted solution]

We needed two thing to change to make it (compile for PCIe7842R on Windows 11) work:

1. "Option C" described in: Visual C++ Version Redistributable Pop-Up When Compiling LabVIEW FPGA Code - NI

2. replace the "libPortability.dll":

• Search for xilinx-ise-win10-hang-hotfix.zip
• Replace the DLLs in these folders:
• C:\Xilinx\14.7\ISE_DS\ISE\lib\nt64\libPortability.dll
• C:\Xilinx\14.7\ISE_DS\common\lib\nt64\libPortability.dll
• Restart the PC to ensure the new DLL is loaded.

Thanks to Sofi Abovyan from NI support team!

*We used:
- Labview 2022 Q3 (32-bit)
- LabVIEW FPGA Module 2022 Q3 (32-bit)
- Xilinx Compilation Tools: ISE 14.7.

- NI-RIO driver: NI-RIO 22.8 

[FilipZZZ]

It worked! Thank you so much! We compiled on our Windows 10 for the first time after 2 years. Sofi Abovyan is for sure a saint.

From the xilinx-ise-win10-hang-hotfix.zip we also had to use the replacement DLLs in the /nt/ directory (probably due to 32-bit LabVIEW)

Our DLLs were at (it was probably the first one that was being used):

• c:\NIFPGA\programs\Xilinx14_7\ISE\lib\nt\libPortability.dll
• c:\NIFPGA\programs\Xilinx14_7\common\lib\nt\libPortability.dll
• c:\NIFPGA\programs\Xilinx14_7\ISE\lib\nt64\libPortability.dll
• c:\NIFPGA\programs\Xilinx14_7\common\lib\nt64\libPortability.dll

Compilation took like twenty minutes and it was a success.