Disabling FPGA Live Reconfiguration

During FPGA live reconfiguration (which starts when you activate an applet), LightBridge 2 ACL disappears from the PCI bus for a short time. However, the disappearance of a device from the PCI bus is not supported by all motherboards. (See also Crash Protection.)

If your host PC does not support live reconfiguration of the FPGA, you may want to generally disable FPGA live configuration.

Chipsets known to support FPGA live configuration

 

High-end mainboards with server level chipset support FPGA live configuration. The following chipsets are known to support FPGA live configuration without reboot in some mainboards:

  • Intel® X58 Express
  • Intel® X79 Express
  • Intel® Z87 (Z99)

We do not guarantee FPGA live configuration with the aforementioned chipsets. For further details, see Flashing.

   

You can always disable the live reconfiguration of the FPGA. After disabling, you will need to power cycle (cold-boot) your LightBridge 2 device after flashing it.

To disable the live reconfiguration of the FPGA:

  1. Add the following system environment variable to your system:
    SISO_ENABLE_RECONFIGURATION
  2. Set it to “NO”:
    SISO_ENABLE_RECONFIGURATION=NO

After each flashing, you will now be prompted to power cycle (cold-boot) your host PC:

To power cycle your host PC:

  1. Click Shut Down to shut down your host PC completely (the Restart option is not enough).
  2. After the computer is completely off, wait for some seconds.
  3. Start the host PC again.

Complete Shut Down Essential

 

For power cycling, it is not enough use the Restart option of Windows. Complete shut down and following new start are essential when you need to power cycle your host PC.