Disk Usage and the Xilinx Tools
- Russell Joyce (Deactivated)
- Ian Gray
FPGA synthesis can use a lot of space, which will come out of your standard disk quota.
If you are having strange problems when exporting hardware designs, running synthesis and implementation, or compiling HLS projects, it's possible that you've run out of disk space.
Disk Quota on the Lab PCs
You can check how much space you have left in a Linux terminal using:
quota -s
If you need to clear disk space, one good place to start is the .cache folder in your home directory, as it should be safe to delete anything in here. Otherwise, you can use the du command or the Disk Usage Analyser program installed on the lab PCs to see where you can save space.
For more information on disk quotas, etc. see the IT Services Filestore pages.
Problems with the Tools
If the tools still do strange things after making some space, it's possible that you ran out of space during compilation, and some of the output from the tools is corrupted. In this case, try restarting the tools, cleaning your project, and generating outputs again.
If the tools have problems launching after running out of space (e.g. SDK giving a (null) error and crashing), try closing all Xilinx tools and deleting the .Xilinx, .Xil and .eclipse folders in your home directory.
If you have any strange errors that you can't fix, let a demonstrator know – we've probably seen them before.
Cleaning Vivado Projects
After generating a bitfile, Vivado will keep a lot of temporary files around from synthesis and implementation. These are useful if you plan to keep using this project, but can safely be deleted from old projects if you need to space.
To delete these files, right-click "Run Synthesis" or "Run Implementation in the Flow Navigator, and select "Reset Synthesis Run" or "Reset Implementation Run". For more information, see https://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/50440.html.
Archiving Vivado Projects
To save a copy of a Vivado project (with or without run results), e.g. for backing up or saving to Google Drive, you can use File -> Archive Project in Vivado.