Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

adaptivesupport.amd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 254 posts

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#141

Post by KallDrexx »

nmaludy wrote: post #24

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 datash…

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#142

Post by manwe150 »

mzajc wrote: post #102
charcircuit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried docker or WSL2. Modern virtualization should make it possible to seamlessly run Linux while in Windows.

I have, and compared to just running Linux it's not very good. For starters, the shared filesystem is incredibly slow, there is no hardware passthrough support out of the box (even for USB), the graphics support is incomplete and there's lots of non-standard defaults like custom kernel images and a custom init. That's on top of all the bugs and horrible error reporting. It still beats Windows, but given the choice, I…

The open source community has hijacked VBox drivers to get USB pass through working and is the official solution from Microsoft to that problem (since it requires a signed driver on the host, and RedHat was authorized to sign drivers, so Microsoft can provide their drivers to work around the signing requirements of the OS)

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#143

Post by robinsonb5 »

rustybolt wrote: post #82

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 d…

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#144

Post by atq2119 »

tux3 wrote: post #22
izacus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

And, since there's a pipeline from students and hobbyists to professional use, it's risking the future.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#145

Post by Dylan16807 »

Aurornis wrote: post #132
Dylan16807 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse. That's not the question that was asked. Neither calling a company's actions disgraceful nor anything else in the posts that triggered that official reply were abusive to customer service.

I actually support companies who empower their customer facing employees to enforce civility. It means the company cares more about their employees than sacrificing them in favor of maybe getting a few more sales from angry customers.

I disagree that enforcing civility means that, especially if mkru's comments are considered too uncivil.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#146

Post by aniceperson »

snarfy wrote: post #134

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.

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#147

Post by chaostheory »

jeroenhd wrote: post #57
alphabeta3r56 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Yes, but that’s resistance for potential users they can’t afford if they ever want adoption on the level of CUDA.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#149

Post by kriro »

guiambros wrote: post #5

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 embrac…

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#150

Post by bborud »

Aurornis wrote: post #113
bborud wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? Especially when to company has just announced changes that limit what users can do with their products. The older I get the less I want to deal with companies that act like primadonnas and the technologies they make. This is also why I don’t do phon…

> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse. It should not be the job of a forum moderator to take abuse. Warning them about the rules of the forum and then enf…

When a company screws over entire segments of their customers people get angry. And they don’t get less angry when their frustration is belittled by someone how essentially says “your dissatisfaction means less to us than the words you choose to describe it”.

_Professionals_ de-escalate. This was not that.

Post reply on HN