Wow, that's a ridiculously defeatist attitude. Comparing reverse engineering a FPGA to landing on the moon? First of all, it's a relatively new field for open

Wow, that's a ridiculously defeatist attitude. Comparing reverse engineering a FPGA to landing on the moon? First of all, it's a relatively new field for open source. The icestorm project only got a complete synthesis to bitstream pipeline working last month. So although you see "comments all the time", it's not like development is stagnating. In fact, it got off the ground for the first time. It's not surprising it lacks support for hard peripherals at this point in development. Lack of timing analysis is a showstopper for any serious design as well, but it's not like it's an unsolvable problem. >There's zero incentive for Xilinx to allow a free software competitor What? How is another system that sells their chips a competitor? AMD reacted to open source driver development by providing documentation for their GPUs. The exact opposite seems kind of an extreme position. Xilinx is already pretty open source friendly on the software side with their Linux kernel contributions. And it's not like they are the only vendor in existence. The security features on FPGAs right now are to prevent people from getting the bitstreams out. Just like on virtually every modern microcontroller. That hasn't stopped open source toolchains one bit. FWIW I've done designs on the Zynq too, it's certainly one of the most complicated cases and I doubt it will have open source support any time soon. But most of the critical stuff is in the hard blocks (e.g. ddr timing and the like), and it's actually the easiest because there is not really any p&r work to do there, it's just figuring out what the configuration bits are. (sorry if I sound overly defensive, I work on free video codecs and get a very similar attitude out of many other people who feel that performant video codecs are not possible outside of MPEG. it gets incredibly frustrating)