The movie “Inception” seems to have gathered quite a following among the technology-affine crowd, similar to what happened when Matrix came out — which is not all that surprising since both movies have quite a bit in common.

Now, however, some very dedicated folks have implemented Inception’s plot as a multithreaded C application, where characters are represented by separate but interacting threads, sharing functions (the dream levels) but performing different actions within the dreams. Analogous to the movie, the code actually uses x86 code morphing techniques to “implant” modified instructions into the Fischer thread’s instruction stream.

This is crazy on so many levels. And to think that I already had trouble following the movie…

Working with complex reconfigurable SoC designs in Xilinx EDK can be a tedious process — especially, when you’re tweaking single VHDL source files of a single pcore, just to have all the pcores resynthesized by a twitchy makefile within the EDK build process.

To cut down on design turnaround times, we’ve written a simple Python script called xstcache, which does the same what ccache does for C sources. It looks at the input files, synthesis parameters and the environment, and, if the same combination has been used for a previous synthesis run, re-uses the result (the netlist) of that synthesis iteration without actually running XST.

For typical EDK projects, this reduces the time for the syntesis step considerably, as most pcore sources do not change between synthesis iterations.

You can find xstcache at GitHub.