Hallo,
in the Xilinx Webpack toolchain, programming external devices is needed. For that purpose, impact (the program to download the configuration program) accesses the hardware through a "windrvd" (*1) sys-file (www.jungo.com) via DeviceIoControls. There are programmers for the parallel port and for USB.
For using wine to program the devices, this is a showstopper.
However windrvr is cross platform, and a Linux version is available and windrvr customers probably can distribute the binary kernel module (*2). In the easiest of all possible worlds, a simple translation of the DeviceIOControl calls to the appropriate Linux ioctl()s would be needed. However things get complicated, as the header file, defining the Interface is only available with some form of NDA. It is to be expected, that the arguments to the DeviceIOCobtrol/ioctl call are the same. If we don't need to rearrange the argument, simple argument passing could be possible, and no knowledge of the headers would be needed.
Comments welcome.
(*1): I know that the windrvr concept is breaks all unix security concept... (*2): Does anybody know how Linux windrvr is distributed to the final customers? As a pure binary kernel module, binding the user to some kernel or with public open source interface so the user may recompile the kernel?
Bye