Doing new drivers is not a huge deal. At least you are programming them in C with sane tooling against a sane API. Getting up a simple setup with a bit of DMA a

Doing new drivers is not a huge deal. At least you are programming them in C with sane tooling against a sane API. Getting up a simple setup with a bit of DMA and a few registers is not that hard. It pales compared to the amount of pain you will go through working with the FPGA tooling. The insanity begins with the fact that they are very GUI centric with comparatively little guidance on batch processing capabilities. This is despite the fact that you usually run these tools on ~80 core servers, so you have nicely lagging X11 windows all day