I have some tangential experience, I was a software engineer on a project that had an FPGA based PCIe card. You can do some cool stuff, but development can be v

I have some tangential experience, I was a software engineer on a project that had an FPGA based PCIe card. You can do some cool stuff, but development can be very frustrating. PCIe enumeration happens early in startup. Until things are basically working, you have to have a computer that you are ok restarting every few minutes. A test cycle is like: flash image, restart computer, try to determine why it failed.