12 ms·

Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

• notorandit 5mo ago
  Money. It is always money. It has always been money. It will always be money.
• akarambir 5mo ago
  The official replies are addressing questions that nobody has asked. The main issue is why Linux support is being removed from the Basic tier while Windows is still allowed. To grow the ecosystem, AMD needs more people working on their hardware. Restricting Linux will only alienates students, hobbyists, and devs who want to adopt AMD tech. - From long term AMD user
  • izacus 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • tux3 5mo ago
      Vivado already supports Linux, the development is supported by very large customers that put FPGAs in cars, [REDACTED], and other kinds of objects that crash into other objects. This is just hurting students and hobbyists.
      • atq2119 5mo ago
        And, since there's a pipeline from students and hobbyists to professional use, it's risking the future.
        • tardedmeme 5mo ago
          AMD has been unable to not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for ages. I'd almost say someone high up is getting kickbacks from their competitors.
      • ua709 5mo ago
        Schools can join the AMD University Program and get back to where they were, and more. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html As for hobbyists, in the world of $0.03 microcontrollers, strong competition on the low end from Chinese manufacturers, and where few people learn HDLs, is NRE money in the hobby market really money well spent? I'm a HW designer and even I use microcontrollers now for most things, but not everything, because it's usually cheaper and faster. With semiconductor prices coming down as far as they have I think the world has probably fundamentally changed for FPGAs and the niche they occupied is shrinking fast.
      • jeltz 5mo ago
        And hurting AMD.
    • adrian_b 5mo ago
      What you say is ridiculous. The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the vendors like AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products. A few old AMD FPGAs have been reversed engineered, e.g. some ARTIX-7, so for them there is no need for the rather bad AMD tools, but for most AMD formerly Xilinx FPGAs it is impossible to create better tools for lack of documentation. As long as AMD refuses to provide the technical documentation required to use their products, it should have been a legal obligation to at least provide basic tools that allows the buyer of such products to actually use "FPGAs", i.e. to "field-program" them, as the name of the sold product claims. Like many other FPGA developers, I could write myself better FPGA development tools than what AMD provides, if I had access to the complete FPGA technical documentation to which only a few big companies have access, a restriction whose only possible purpose is to prevent competition in the FPGA market. If AMD had documented the exact format of the bit stream required to program each model of their FPGAs and the complete timing consequences of each synthesis choice, nobody would need any FPGA simulation or synthesis tool provided by AMD in Vivado.
      • charcircuit 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        • Dylan16807 5mo ago
          No, it's not "on the Linux community" to bribe a company out of releasing hardware in a broken state of usability.
          • charcircuit 5mo ago
            It's no more a bribe than having to pay money to buy the latest C++ standard when implementing a C++ compiler. The reality is that companies pay each other for partnerships all of the time. There is value to AMD for keeping this documentation secret and there is value for having control over what design tools exist for them. It makes sense that AMD would want to be compensated in this case and would not want to do work for free which could undermine their business. The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
    • izacus 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      • pyrale 5mo ago
        More like the notion of seeing different treatment between OSes. No one likes being punished for a choice that shouldn't be any of the selling party's business. That's especially true in the Linux community, which was the target of Microsoft's anticompetitive policies for decades. That's just like when macOS users got mad when they learned they were targeted by marketing schemes to sell them more expensive stuff [1]. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792590/orbitz-targets-mac-users-for-pricier-hotels https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792590/orbitz-targets-mac-...
        • izacus 5mo ago
          Maintaining software on Linux just takes more time and effort - due to less stability and number of distros.
          • pqtyw 5mo ago
            AMD is making more than enough money from hardware sales to fund the software that actually makes is usable. Even Apple doesn't charge you for the software needed to actually be able to use their devices (well since around Snow Leopard or so, at least). But I suppose the idea of not being as greedy as possible really "pisses off" AMD's executives (and presumably some of the people shilling for them here). And presumably you didn't read the article since AMD will continue to support this on Linux anyway.
          • pyrale 5mo ago
            AMD does maintain Linux anyway, for their paid tiers. It's not like they're saving money by dumping the free tier for Linux.
      • robinsonb5 5mo ago
        The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off. If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.
    • matheusmoreira 5mo ago
      Nah. Why do Windows users get it for free while I have to pay because I'm an "advanced" user? I'm not rewarding that. I'll reward companies like Valve instead.
    • pjc50 5mo ago
      This tier of the tool is free on Windows. It might be a fair criticism that Linux users don't pay for software, but being a dick about it isn't going to get you anywhere. (It's weird to see people on HN shilling for AMD against Linux, though. Very astroturf flavored)
  • mort96 5mo ago
    The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD... Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
    • adrian_b 5mo ago
      Some people, including the management of most big corporations, claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior", while the actions that do physical harm to others, e.g. by tricking or forcing them to pay an extra part of their hard-earned money for things that should not have been paid, because they had already been paid in another form, instead of using that money for worthy purposes, are not "unacceptable abusive behavior". Obviously, I believe that a decision like that made by AMD now is a much more "unacceptable abusive behavior" than any kind of verbal insult ever known to mankind. This kind of decision is a masked price rise of the AMD FPGAs that applies only to small businesses and individuals, while the big quasi-monopolistic companies are not affected, which will make competing with them even more difficult. What annoys me most about this kind of policies aimed to hurt small businesses and individuals and favor big companies, which have become more and more frequent, is that in most cases they do not provide any financial benefit whatsoever to the company that enacts them, because they limit competition not in the market where that company activates, but in related markets. However such policies are very beneficial for the entire class of people who are major shareholders, board members or executives in big companies, by ensuring that all markets are eventually dominated by few, which has happened especially after the end of the nineties of the past century, resulting in the current unhealthy economies of the Western countries and especially of USA. This success of the quasi-monopolies has been caused by the lack of truly adequate consumer protection laws.
      • Drakim 5mo ago
        I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed. AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
  • t_mahmood 5mo ago
    When they do not have any justifiable answer, or don't want to answer, but need to keep the facade on, they'll sidestep and tell you how hard they are working on something, and how many unrelated things they've archived. - A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
  • alphabeta3r56 5mo ago
    Yeah this is such an own goal. You want students using your code to get them to use it in job. They have learnt nothing from cuda
    • jeroenhd 5mo ago
      They still have a system for sponsoring students (through professors). They're not entirely crazy. It does make me wonder how much money they must be losing on these chips that they've turned this desperate for licensing costs.
      • chaostheory 5mo ago
        Yes, but that’s resistance for potential users they can’t afford if they ever want adoption on the level of CUDA.
      • throwaway85825 5mo ago
        Usually it's just some idiot manager trying to juice quarterly numbers and get promoted. Then they jump to another company and the damage takes years to kick in.
      • musicale 5mo ago
        They have learnt... very slightly more than nothing from CUDA.
  • DoctorOW 5mo ago
    > For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier? > This is AMD's marketing decision. > Kind Regards, > Anatoli Curran, > Xilinx/AMD Forum Moderator I mean, nobody in that forum necessarily knows why. It just came from above.
    • cfinnberg 5mo ago
      I think many haven't read that part, as it is hidden by default and one have to expand the answer to see it. At least that was what happened to me... I didn't noticed it until you pointed it out.
  • nubinetwork 5mo ago
    But amd doesn't need you, all they care about is ai. https://youtu.be/uJcf2UGCH1w https://youtu.be/uJcf2UGCH1w
  • petterroea 5mo ago
    One would've thought they had learned from their supposed driver superiority over Nvidia due to embracing Linux users with OSS drivers
    • tliltocatl 5mo ago
      I guess FPGA division (nee Xilinx, which was always a bit sketchy, even if they had best silicon) doesn't learn much from the GPU division.
  • bigfatkitten 5mo ago
    Those students and hobbyists often end up in jobs where they are involved in multi million dollar purchasing decisions. AMD’s MBA types extinguish that early mindshare at their own peril.
    • folbec 5mo ago
      MBAs are mercenaries, that's part of their formation. They fully expect to be working somewhere else when things start looking bad. They are just doing what mercenaries have been doing for millennia : cost a lot in peace time, loot the population, and run away or cut a deal with the invader when the goings get though. A good example is the Russian "Africa Corp" in Mali. Expensive, atrocities against the population and cut a deal with the jihadist to run away when they came last month.
  • ua709 5mo ago
    I don't think AMD can say this but I think the reality is for most hobbyists this is the prevailing attitude: "The Harsh Truth about FPGAs (You Should Avoid Them?!)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3d8uFKsJiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3d8uFKsJiY a.k.a. Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice. Low end FPGAs don't compete well with low end microcontrollers and more people know how to use microcontrollers. Universities are fine as they can sign up for the University Program and get the licensees they used to get. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html I think the reality is the niche that FPGAs occupied is getting hit hard on the high and low end. Cheap Chinese FPGAs are prevalent, cheap microcontrollers more so, and on the high-end making an ASIC that compete with a high-end FPGA has never been cheaper, and is getting cheaper and easier everyday. 65-28nm is very easy to use now (relatively speaking) and is very low cost with tons of tape outs and there is good competition. Beating an FPGA with an ASIC is not all that hard. Grad students at CMU, Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc. do it all the time in their tape-out class. Making an ASIC is not as easy as an FPGA for sure, especially if you need DDR and serdes. And NRE for ASICs for small volume ( <1K units) is higher. But it is getting easier and cheaper everyday. And it's now feasible for small teams (say ~6) to do it. I think they need to look very hard at where they spend their NRE now to stay relevant and they need to start getting brutal because I am sure the amount of revenue they're bringing in is under serious attack. As to why Windows and not Linux? It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another. Maybe they don't even do it an just contract it out and Windows contractors are easier to find, but I'll bet it's just a basic cost issue at the end of the day.
    • lpribis 5mo ago
      Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA? 1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price. 2. As a hobbyist, you want to EXPERIMENT. You cannot do that with an ASIC. Hobbyists want to do something simple, test it on real hardware, and slowly build up from that. I don't have the time nor expertise nor motivation to spend months writing verification to get it right the first time for a tapeout. "Just use a microcontroller"... I will concede that microcontrollers do cover 90% of hobbyists use cases (that number increasing by the day). But for hobbyists sometimes you want to learn HDL or digital logic or computer engineering. You can do this hands on with a FPGA much more effectively than in software. > It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another. They already need to maintain the Linux build for all the other paid tiers?? These are the same software with different features locked behind a license key. It costs them NOTHING to keep the build enabled for free tier.
• sakjur 5mo ago
  Link to AMDs description of the new pricing being criticized: https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/vivado/vivado-licensing-options.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/adaptive-socs-and-f...
  • amaterasu 5mo ago
    I love the way they buried the “we are no longer supporting an entire operating system” in a small missing tick, half way down the page…
    • duskwuff 5mo ago
      Oh, no, it's sillier than that. They do still support Linux... but only if you give them money.
      • petepete 5mo ago
        This might be a good opportunity for Microsoft to bring back their 'total cost of ownership' advertising campaign.
      • formerly_proven 5mo ago
        You don't 2.5x your stock price in two months by underextracting value.
• fleventynine 5mo ago
  I wonder how good LLM agents are at reverse engineering FPGA bitstreams... I want a robust open-source ecosystem where anyone can take my hardware projects and modify them without needing to deal with licensing friction.
  • kevmo314 5mo ago
    The difficult part is the place and route algorithm, not the bitstream. The proprietary ones already take quite a long time to solve: I regularly have 12-24h runs. Perhaps an open source one could do better? But it's not quite as straightforward as reverse engineering a proprietary bitstream.
    • javawizard 5mo ago
      That's why nextpnr exists :) https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr As someone actively working on nextpnr support for a fairly new FPGA architecture, it really is amazing that we have something like that in the open source world. YosysHQ are one of my favorite companies to exist.
      • epsilon537 5mo ago
        Nextpnr and Project X-Ray are amazing projects. Reverse engineering the physical map of, say, a 7-series FPGA is no small feat. However, I wonder if they'll ever be able to really compete with Vivado without getting access to the characterization models for timing. I would love to switch over, but the Fmax of my project routed with nextpnr is less than half of what I get with Vivado.
    • Taniwha 5mo ago
      When I first started doing chip design my boss paid more for tools per year than he paid me ... now days open source tool chains are leaping ahead ... I don't need a boss (or VCs) in order to design chips
    • FarmerPotato 5mo ago
      Somewhere in reverse-engineering-land is the desire to figure out undocumented hardware blocks. I’m not disagreeing about PNR here.
• guiambros 5mo ago
  It's really unfortunate that FPGA development is still stuck in the 90s. The incentives between IP owners and hobbyists are so misaligned that I don't see the possibility of this ever improving. The market is full of dark patterns, and vendors like AMD/Xilinx can pull shitty moves like what OP highlighted, knowing there is no decent alternative (Altera is another disaster). Lattice had the opportunity to fully embrace opensource toolchain and try to disrupt from the bottom, but they seem stuck in the middle, not wanting to commit one way or another. I'm grateful to SymbiFlow, and IceStorm and others, even though they obviously lack support for proprietary hardware features.
  • kriro 5mo ago
    I agree. Once upon a time I was quite interested in FPGAs but the infrastructure being so uninviting in general made me move on completely. I was somewhat recently involved in quantizing neural networks with FINN (AMD) and let's just say...that was a pretty bad experience overall.
    • tremon 5mo ago
      Yes, same here. Did my thesis on reconfigurable co-processors in the 00s, then quickly moved away from that market due to the atrocious tooling availability and OS support once I was no longer a student.
• jabl 5mo ago
  Good news for FOSS FPGA toolchains, I suppose. Eg https://f4pga.org/ https://f4pga.org/ for some kind of umbrella project.
• jkubic 5mo ago
  I’ve spent several hundred thousand on Xilinx FPGAs yet they nickel and dime me for licenses. It’s not the cost that’s a problem—-it’s the hassle of making a PO for a license to set up new computers, set up CI, hiring new teammates, setting up for interns/students. Xilinx has continued to go downhill since their acquisition by AMD.. it used to feel like it was run by engineers who understood their customers, now it seems to be getting taken over by the MBA crowd who only understands pinching pennies and chiseling their own loyal customers
  • HNisCIS 5mo ago
    This x10000 I can get parts, they're part of a BOM that gets approved, but getting POs approved for software is a pain in the ass. Been considering switching next gen stuff to microchip.
    • Kubuxu 5mo ago
      Microchip also wants money for license to their design suite.
      • HNisCIS 5mo ago
        The parts were considering are available under their free tier IIRC
    • indrora 5mo ago
      This is one reason why I see companies like Gowin winning the game in the long run.
  • londons_explore 5mo ago
    Tbh, I think they should just charge for the chips and keep the software free.
    • Joker_vD 5mo ago
      Yep. Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky (2002): "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Also, from the 2004's "How Microsoft Lost the API War": The logical conclusion of this is that if you’re trying to sell operating systems, the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software for your operating system. That’s why Steve Ballmer was jumping around the stage shouting “Developers, developers, developers, developers.” It’s so important for Microsoft that the only reason they don’t outright give away development tools for Windows is because they don’t want to inadvertently cut off the oxygen to competitive development tools vendors (well, those that are left) because having a variety of development tools available for their platform makes it that much more attractive to developers. But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland. Similar logic applies to selling FPGAs.
• jwrallie 5mo ago
  I’m working in education and will change to other vendors in the near future. That means all my students will do so as well. Windows cannot provide feature parity for workloads that require cross compiling, AMD could at least support RHEL like the old days.
  • charcircuit 5mo ago
    Have you tried docker or WSL2. Modern virtualization should make it possible to seamlessly run Linux while in Windows.
    • arccy 5mo ago
      nobody should support MicroSlop
      • charcircuit 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        • mzajc 5mo ago
          AMD dropped support for Linux on the free plan, not the other way around. Nor is this a Linux problem, because they still allow paid users to run the software on Linux. As far as what's evident from the support thread goes, this is the closest to a justification given: > AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers. Looks like AMD equates Linux to professional use and Windows to simple, entry-level needs :)
          • charcircuit 5mo ago
            If Microsoft didn't have a good operating system it wouldn't have such a dominant market share for the free tier of Vivado. If the Linux community actually properly competed and gained 50% market share then support would not have been dropped. You can't blame companies giving up on Linux on the company itself. Eventually the Linux community will need to take responsibility for their failures.
• Taniwha 5mo ago
  Well Gowin here I come I guess
  • lnsru 5mo ago
    I took Efinix. They have cute FPGA with memory in one package. It saves me lots of time for routing the board.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• fsh 5mo ago
  This is terrible news for university users trying to professionalize their FPGA development with CI/CD. Which is probably the point of the change.
• rvz 5mo ago
  How is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their software on Linux for free? Would you maintain your own Linux software (and its distros) for $0? I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux especially as Linux support is always ill defined (there are hundreds of distros to support and test.)
  • einrealist 5mo ago
    Maintaining support for Windows is free?
    • rvz 5mo ago
      "free" as in what? Time? There is always someone paying. Linux should be no different.
      • fsh 5mo ago
        The users are paying plenty of money for AMD FPGAs.
      • mort96 5mo ago
        Why should Windows be different?
      • croes 5mo ago
        > why I can use BASIC tier for simple, entry-level nodes on Windows, but not on Linux. That’s exactly what people are asking for. Why do Linux users have to pay and Windows users don’t.
  • adrian_b 5mo ago
    First of all, you already pay for the FPGAs, and the only reason why you pay for them is that they are "Field-Programmable" GAs. To be able to use the product that you own, as advertised, you MUST have the AMD software tools, because they refuse to provide the technical documentation that would allow the use of FPGAs without vendor-provided tools. It is abusive to request an additional big payment in order to use the bought product as intended. This additional payment for the FPGA programming tool is negligible for big companies, which also get great discounts in the price of the FPGAs they buy, but it hurts any small companies and individuals who want to use FPGAs. These kind of policies never increase in any way the revenue of a company like AMD but they ensure that any market where such policies are frequent become dominated by a few quasi-monopolies, instead of having a healthy competition that keeps prices low for computers, as it existed in electronics until around a quarter of century ago. Their FPGA development software is not an independent product, but it is a part of the FPGAs they are selling, like the boxes in which such FPGAs are packaged. Your claim that they get $0 for their software is as ridiculous as the claim that Intel can no longer sell boxed CPUs, because they get $0 for the cardboard and plastic packages of their CPUs. For now, only the Linux version of the FPGA tools has been discontinued, the free and worse Windows version still exists, so what you say in the last version of your comment is still wrong, because the Windows users are not monetized, yet.
• nmaludy 5mo ago
  We've had good experiences with Lattice parts. Their software tools are free for all of their basic chips. They only charge for licensing when you use the higher end SKUs with SerDes. Example, you can use and develop on an ECP5 or Certus using their free license, but then you need a paid license to work on ECP5-5G or CertusPro chips. They're not perfect, but they're better to work with than Xilinx. Also, their datasheetd are better than Xilinx in my experience. Give Lattice a look for your next project.
  • officialchicken 5mo ago
    > Give Lattice a look for your next project. Sometime after the heat death of the universe, maybe. IME raising prices during development is their modus operandi.
  • stn8188 5mo ago
    I came in here to recommend Lattice as well, at least for small glue-logic type applications. I've used their various MaxhXO lines extensively and really enjoy working with them.
  • KallDrexx 5mo ago
    FWIW I'm using Yosis for my Ice40 Lattice FPGA purely because their Linux support is bad. Getting a free hobby license requires emailing them with MAC addresses (which means I have to do that for my desktop, laptop, and again for any future machine I may get). Then getting the tools to actually run on Linux seemed to be impossible that I just gave up. It's not clear that I have the Yosys and open source options for my Xilinx based fpgas.
    • _humenberger 5mo ago
      https://github.com/openxc7 https://github.com/openxc7 Does support all FPGAs from the Series7 (Spartan7, Artix7, Kintex7, Zynq70xx)
      • KallDrexx 5mo ago
        Ooooh awesome thanks!
• throwuxiytayq 5mo ago
  What’s next? Take away mouse support in the free tier? You could these fucking cretins with GPT2 and the company would flourish.
• cumshitpiss 5mo ago
  I can see American companies quickly loose market dominance to Chinese FPGA manufacturers with this short sighted behavior. People don’t realize how big FPGAs are in Asia.
• greatgib 5mo ago
  This Anatoli forum moderator looks like to be quite a very bad user representative. I can understand that they wouldn't reply to the user but the way he replies is aggressive and would motivate me more to insult AMD and co that have a civil exchange. That being said, it really sucks when companies do such asshole move as forcing you to use windows. Especially because it was not even AMD in the first place but they snatched xilinx and now will try to use the big tech playbook.
• PowerElectronix 5mo ago
  Amd is gonna murder xilinx like intel did altera
• bigfatkitten 5mo ago
  How fortunate that Quartus Prime Lite runs under Linux. Something to keep in mind next time you’re selecting a device for a small project.
  • robinsonb5 5mo ago
    So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free. (Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.) There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
• embirdating 5mo ago
  [dead]
• patrickndaye919 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• dreamcompiler 5mo ago
  Charging for Vivado has always struck me as ridiculous. It's a software dongle that enables Xilinx hardware, and the hardware is how they make money. Give Vivado away for free and support it on Linux and Mac, and you'll sell 10x as many chips.
  • elevation 5mo ago
    > you'll sell 10x as many chips The cost of the tooling is probably blocking a few sales, but the biggest blocker for FPGA sales is price of the parts themselves. FPGAs make the most sense where absolute quantities are low and the customer is not cost-sensitive. As soon as you get volume, ASIC wins out. And cost sensitive applications can almost always make do with a CPU that has the correct IO configuration. For FPGAs to win at scale they'd need to be significantly cheaper.
• KnuthIsGod 5mo ago
  Hoping for a decent Chinese alternative to AMD and Intel...
• boesboes 5mo ago
  They are all the same. Greedy little bitches.
• dmpk2k 5mo ago
  For all its faults, you won’t get a rug-pull like this with OSS CAD Suite and something like the ECP5, especially as a hobbyist.
• boomskats 5mo ago
  Trying to read between the lines, here are my lazy sunday morning guesses at what might be going on here: 1. The Xilinx team are pushing back on the increasing number of things they have to support. Silver lining, maybe this means they're being asked to work on a new product that will require redistribution of headcount (like maybe another NPU ) 1.1. Their Linux expertise is lacking / stretched across multiple teams (this is the impression I got from following the work in github.com/amd/xdna-driver over the last year or two). Maybe this is the outcome of a 'these are the things i'm doing now, so if you want me to do something new then tell me which of these things I can drop' type conversation & where the pushback is coming from (maybe we'll get some fedora support in that repo though ) . 2. Marketing have been pushing for something that helps them 'fight the AI fight', and it may be that they've now been given the mandate so the division is in the midst of the typical top-down mythical man-day reallocation wave. Xilinx have probably been told that priorities are shifting towards integrating more of the Xilinx inference tech with more mainstream AMD products, possibly at the expense of their existing roadmap. Xilinx have tenured employees who know what they're doing and don't want to retrain/change, so this is a side-effect of the pushback. 3. This is a straight-up monetisation strategy. Marketing ran a project and concluded thta it's just not worth supporting that lower tier for free. It may be that even though have a majority Windows userbase, the [commercially serious | higher stakes | CICD pipeline based] development actually happens on Linux, and this is them closing that loop. Not quite a Docker Desktop situation, but maybe not that dissimilar - they're saying that most professional/commercial users are Linux users, and the days of unlimited free commercial use on the smaller devices are over. Maybe the margins on those lower end devices aren't good enough to justify the amount of support overhead, and pay-to-play will filter out the noise and ensure they're talking to users who are already bought-in. Or, maybe somebody just needs an earnings blip on a slide somewhere, and this is them milking their startup/smb customers. My guess is it's all of the above.
  • vitally3643 5mo ago
    None of that makes any sense because they still support linux, just not on the free tier. They aren't saving themselves any time or effort because linux is still supported for paying users.
• rustybolt 5mo ago
  This sucks. I was working on a video course on building CPUs on an FPGA that uses Vivado (because I am somewhat familiar with the ecosystem and have dev boards with Artix FPGAs). I am still contemplating my options. I can still use Vivado 2025, I guess, but I am not sure that is the right direction. What are realistic alternatives for Vivado? (Taking into account the availability of supported affordable entry-level dev boards?)
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • robinsonb5 5mo ago
    For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.) Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100. Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets. The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's. For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general. I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus. IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply. ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.
    • rustybolt 5mo ago
      Thank you for your reply! I did a bit of research and, since I do want to use quite some peripherals, I have gone for the ULX3S. A big factor here was documentation and availability; If I would have been able to find a MiSTer Pi I might have gone for that instead. I now bought a ULX3S on a whim, and will at least evaluate how usable it is for my purposes. It will take quite some time to familiarize myself with a new toolchain, which kinda sucks. One advantage of these big proprietary IDEs is that they integrate a lot of functionality into one "unit" (as far as the user/programmer is concerned), instead of having to install a lot of separate tools. For the course, I am now considering to "support" an AMD board, an Intel one, and a Lattice one.
• RossBencina 5mo ago
  No one seems to have mentioned the obvious question: Does Vivado already run under WINE? If not, are there any major blockers?
  • 15155 5mo ago
    Even if it did, the Windows version is vastly inferior to the Linux version with regards to multithreading and other capabilities.
• danborn26 5mo ago
  Dropping Linux support on the free tier feels like a huge step backward for hobbyists and students. So many academic and open source FPGA workflows rely entirely on Linux environments.
• PaulHoule 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • tardedmeme 5mo ago
    This is the comment that should be [flagged] [dead] instead of all the ones saying why doesn't the Linux community step up...
  • jdiff 5mo ago
    So obviously none of this is realistic, even the foundations of it don't align with reality, so what point are you trying to make with this comment? I'm afraid it's going over my head.
    • xerox13ster 5mo ago
      AMD is acting like French Aristocracy and they’re telling Linux users to eat cake. It’d be nice if there was digital infrastructure and social will to metaphorically take their heads.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• wucke13 5mo ago
  Software distribution for Linux can be hard. Many distros, different conventions, no FHS is long forgotten, ... However, Xilinx Vivado and Vitis are so obtusely distributed, making it incredibly hard to package them well. Three random issues I remember: 1. We had a lot of trouble with Vivado projects randomly breaking. The culprit: German localization combined with automatic clock frequency derivation. Depending on which logic blocks where wired up how, you would get i.e. 99.999 MHz instead of 100 MHz. Apparently, Vivado uses a localized printf (or equivalent) to generate TCL scripts. In German localization, the decimal is a comma, which is interpreted as additional argument in the TCL scripts. 2. For simulation, scripts scripts are copied from a template folder to the user folder, and subsequently adjusted. They are copied in archive mode. If the template is read-only to the current user, so is the new copy, thus failing the subsequent adjustment. 3. If you run the installer with --help as argument, it pops up an X window displaying the help. In general, IIRC, we need to run a headless X just to run the installer in CLI/batch mode. From a Linux distro maintainer perspective, the packaging is horrible. In particular separation of base installation, configuration, and add-ons is non-existent. Large amount of vendored dependencies, only then to depend on the most minute little packages that Ubuntu supposedly ships. Setting up a reliable, reproducible CI/CD environment based on Vivado is a large headache. That all goes to say: if anything, AMD/Xilinx should be paying its customers to deal with this. Unless there is a major improvement in the software distribution practices for Linux, I could not justify to my employer paying money for this experience. On the other hand, if they commercialize on Linux support, there is soooo much that they can improve by a lot, who knows. Hope dies last and all.
  • stefan_ 5mo ago
    Doesn't help that just to start out you are looking at a 110+ GB size for their tools, which as far as anyone can tell, isn't really justified by anything.
    • genxy 5mo ago
      That's because in the EDA space, they have horrible software practices. Take the worst you can imagine and then go worse from there. So eventually, when things "appear to work" they end up taking a snapshot of a messy directory and calling that the deliverable asset.
• huntero 5mo ago
  As a long time Altera user, one of the biggest things that made me want to jump the fence to Xilinx was the MUCH stronger community and hobbyist uptake. Xilinx benefitted from a ton of people out there educating others on their behalf. Trying to shrink that community seems like a pretty obvious error. The closest thing the Altera world ever had were the old Altera user forums, which were a gold-mine. Intel shut them down immediately on acquisition. I guess it's AMD's turn.
  • hardolaf 5mo ago
    As someone who actually worked for one of the largest FPGA consumers in the world, Xilinx didn't benefit at all from the community and hobbyist uptake. It was just an unnecessary expense and distraction that got in the way of their core mission. Around 5-10 companies make up around 70% of all FPGA silicon sales and the single largest end user is the U.S. Government and its customers (NATO members, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.). Now that cloud took off, FPGAs are somewhat more used in cloud deployments but usually as a stopgap measure until an ASIC can be developed. And putting the lines on the football field has finally stopped being one of the largest consumers because the broadcasters finally learned that they can load new programming onto the FPGAs instead of just ordering new hardware every time something changes.
    • imtringued 5mo ago
      They will notice their mistake once the hiring pool dries up. In the long run they will be replaced by more competitive companies like Efinix.
• zephen 5mo ago
  Speculation: 1) This could actually be an attempt to gain more revenue from big customers that have users who use the free version to test that code can synthesize and run unit tests (by pretending to use smaller parts), and then only use the paid version for the final integration into the actual larger parts. 2) This could give them more customer data more easily. They make no secret of the fact that the free tiers share data with the mothership for product improvement reasons. Maybe they only want to maintain the infrastructure to do this on Windows, or maybe it's harder for customers to subvert on Windows. 3) There will be people running the Windows version on Linux, and explaining how to do it, in 3... 2... 1...
  • consp 5mo ago
    Are the prices so insane this is actually a viable option instead of just buying a bigger license? I always tell juniors to just submit a request for a licence since it will likely cost far less than retraining them or making them work harder and more to compensate for splitting things up (not FPGA related though).
    • zephen 5mo ago
      The problem with FPGA builds is that the search space is ginormous, and repeated optimizations are tried in order to, e.g. make it meet the circuit timing requirements. So, depending on exactly what you are doing it might take many hours to do a full build. And that might soak up all the capacity of a computer. And your Xilinx licenses are either node-locked (so only on that computer) or floating (so, only for one process/user on one computer at a time). You could conceivably have a big computer and timeshare multiple jobs on it, but (a) then you have to have the node-locked license, and (b) no matter what, you'll be slowing down your long job somewhat, by reducing the number of cores and amount of RAM available to it. So it's definitely worthwhile to have multiple builds of different things going, preferably on different computers. Organizations that use these sorts of tools typically have a lot of different tools that cost huge bucks compared to Xilinx software (think $100K/seat vs $4K), so this means that (a) they have entire organizations devoted to license management and working hard to ensure that all licenses are reasonably utilized; and (b) the relative cost to them to counteract this move by Xilinx (AMD) and just buy a few more damned Vivado licenses will not really be that high. Now, do I think this is short-sighted? Yes, probably. But do I also think that it could be revenue-positive for AMD in the short term? Yes, probably.
• torginus 5mo ago
  Just a random rant: I used to do FPGA work for a living, and I remember Xilinx's ISE (Vivado before they renamed it and the company got bought by AMD) was Windows-only, but the first thing that popped up when starting it was a Cygwin window :D
  • Ballas 5mo ago
    Well, currently if you want to run the last version of Xilinx ISE 14.7* in Windows, Xilinx will have you download a linux VM to do so (14.7 was originally supported on Windows, but support was dropped after it broke). On a side note: ISE was discontinued in 2013, but AMD only announced the acquisition in 2020, so I found it strange that those events appear to be linked in your comment? *ISE is still required for any FPGAs older than 7 (like Virtex/Spartan 6).
• torginus 5mo ago
  My personal thoughts on this is that EDA tooling is quite expensive to license, and I'm sure many people have jailbroken their Linux versions to avoid paying for the higher tiers, as Linux doesn't have as strong anti-tamper/app sandboxing capabilities as the other 2 big OSes. Not saying I agree or support this decision, but I can see why they chose to do this, and their set of paying customers is quite different from your average piece of software. If this were Google, they'd have made the whole backend of it cloud only, and required all customers to upload all data to their servers. Obviously this doesn't fly in a lot of industries FPGAs tend to be used in.
• GTP 5mo ago
  Some replies complain about the moderator not answering the main question. While this is a valid complaint, it is also likely that they don't know the answer as well. Now, the best reply would be to openly say that they don't have visibility into upper management's decisions. But, at the same time, I think it's possible that the way they're replying has to do with some internal guidelines on how to handle this sort of questions.
• bfrog 5mo ago
  Why would customers trust a company that does rug pull penny pinching moves like this? Tells me a lot.
• snarfy 5mo ago
  It feels like bean counter logic. They have a development budget with x% towards linux support which is not enough to fully support linux, so they want linux users to pay to help fund the development. It makes sense in some ways, but I would think the entire software suite would be a loss leader to sell hardware. Less barriers to entry and all that.
  • aniceperson 5mo ago
    except their tools are all the linux ecosystem compiled to windows... it is all gcc based and their tutorials recommends those terminals that mimick Unix. it smells stupid managers + microsoft interference.
• dismalaf 5mo ago
  This is the absolute dumbest decision imaginable. The only people hurt by the removal of free trial software for Linux are students and amateurs. Even Apple, possibly the greediest company in the world, knows the importance of cheap hardware and free software for students. Because those students and amateurs eventually become pros who make money decisions. AMD is always so close to pulling ahead of Intel and Nvidia but somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot constantly...
  • fhn 5mo ago
    I think they've pulled ahead of Intel by a large margin
    • dismalaf 5mo ago
      In market cap maybe but in total units sold? In importance? ~70% of PCs/servers sold have Intel chips in them.
• amelius 5mo ago
  Another one of those reflex-triggering moments: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tQIdxbWhHSM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tQIdxbWhHSM
• netrap 5mo ago
  I wonder if they will come to their senses and revert the decision? It does seem a bit boneheaded to drop Linux support on the Basic tier... What actual reason would they need to do that?
• tardedmeme 5mo ago
  There is a ridiculous amount of flagging here. Every comment that says the Linux community gets to show its stuff by doing the work themselves gets flagged. That is no bueno. I've already vouched for several.
  • imtringued 5mo ago
    Every single of those comments is implicitly saying you should violate the IP rights of the FPGA vendor. There is no realistic way to build an OSS or FOSS toolchain without reverse engineering Vivado and dumping the trade secrets contained in it 1:1 Even if you build a clean room version of Vivado, you still need the FPGA metadata and clean rooming the metadata for all FPGAs is basically impossible. Once you understand this, then it sounds incredible dishonest to argue that the Linux community should put in the effort to support a hardware vendor that is hostile to offering their own Linux support when that same company's GPU division had no problem publishing an open source GPU driver for Linux.
    • tardedmeme 5mo ago
      Yes. You should dare to violate their IP rights and not put your name on the project. Just port the Windows version to Linux by linking it with winelib. Extracting trade secrets isn't a violation of anyone's IP rights. Trade secrets are protected against being leaked by employees but they are explicitly not protected against reverse engineering.
• tycoon666 5mo ago
  Perhaps an alternative for some applications: https://colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/ https://colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/
• lukeschlather 5mo ago
  [dead]
• oscillonoscope 5mo ago
  It took a small company I worked for months to get new licenses due to AMD just not responding. I'm not sure they have the ability to actually handle this in a timely manner
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• xx__yy 5mo ago
  What a dog move!
• DocTomoe 5mo ago
  As long as guys with ties get away with it, it will keep happening.
• Doom4535 5mo ago
  Welp, guess I'm glad my grad school project is using a Cyclone FPGA, Intel+Quartus, here I come. Another casualty of this will be running the tools in docker containers, some folks have made some good templates for them and they greatly simplify deployment/installation. (I used to prefer the AMD/Xilinx dev setup, but that has been a bit, and using FuseSoC makes moving platforms a lot easier).
• wepawaj163 5mo ago
  [dead]
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• opem 5mo ago
  What a bs move by amd, they should have taken a lesson from the cuda situation.
• uraji 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
  Supposedly this is going to be resolved, according to this Tweet. Just here-say basically but some hope. https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317 https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317