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The increased demand for usage of FPGA's in control systems has fueled a renewed interest in configuration management strategies for software and firmware. The goal is to produce a toolkit to manage firmware source code over time in an environment where the platforms and vendor toolsets rapidly change, with poor compatibility between versions. We describe a generic approach (hardware and software entities) developed for control applications at the PSI accelerators. Core requirements are to reproduce legacy implementations and perform comparisons for applications, as a function of vendor (e.g. Xilinx, MentorGraphics) software/firmware, development platforms and O/S versions. Additionally we require the ability to run several such comparisons concurrently, with a high degree of automation. The feasibility is demonstrated using cost-effective ESX virtual machine technology from VMware to record snapshots of the environments. Perl/XML scripts are used in conjunction with Expect for automated steering of the procedures. Subversion is used for version control and UML (use cases) to document requirements. In future a RDBMS and web interface utility will provide a synoptic overview.
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