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Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

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

#151

Post by bborud »

Aurornis wrote: post #116
nubinetwork wrote: post #84

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 Typical phone CSR boilover from covid days. Most places I call these days have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.

> have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy. When I had some influence over customer support at a company once I set a similar expectation. We didn’t advertise it up front but if a customer was being abusive over support channels they could be cut off. Big morale boost for customer support. Abusive customers are rare but they can think it’s their job to attack, threaten, and be uncivil. Bei…

Was the anger directed at the moderator?

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

#152

Post by stefan_ »

wucke13 wrote: post #109

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 w…

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.

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

#153

Post by fhn »

dismalaf wrote: post #136

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 b…

I think they've pulled ahead of Intel by a large margin

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

#154

Post by HansHamster »

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…

Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)

That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.

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

#155

Post by jeltz »

tekchip wrote: post #90
makeitdouble wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior" Which is true in a vacuum. Insulting _people_ is abusive behavior and shouldn't be accepted. The issue here is the posts aren't insulting people, they're insulting a company, and a company can't be mentally abused.

There are still individuals, who make up the company, who have to read and try to formulate responses to said abusive behavior. It's usually the lower paid support staff not the engineers or C suite who have those duties. As one of those people I can confirm it absolutely takes a toll.

Nah, feel free to insult any company I have worked for or even the company that I am one of the founders of. I don't see why that should be off limits. But do not insult me as a person.

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

#156

Post by hluska »

bborud wrote: post #150
Aurornis wrote: post #113

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? 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.

I don’t want to register for this forum and I’m having trouble finding any kind of a sort. But are you referring to this comment?

* First, any bad language or abusive behaviour towards AMD, is not acceptable. If continued, we will proceed to block your profiles altogether.

If you are not happy with the new tier licensing flow, no one is stopping users (Students etc) to continue using the current versions of Vivado (any Vivado version prior 2026.1) and develop using free Vivado ML Standard Edition.*

If so, I have a different take on this. It could have been worded better, but I don’t think Anatoli is a native English speaker. Based upon a reply to @mkru, I also don’t think they have much visibility into marketing or if they do, they’re not very interested.

* For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?

This is AMD's marketing decision.*

None of this is great, but English isn’t the easiest language to learn and de-escalation involves a specific speech pattern. And of everything they said in the answers I’ve found, ‘this is AMD’s marketing decision’ is the most blunt. Everything else has more information attached except for the little takedown at the beginning.

I know that’s a lot of words to say that I think belittling is a little strong. But brevity is a juicy topic… :)

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

#157

Post by ua709 »

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.

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

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.

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

#158

Post by jeltz »

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 hurting AMD.

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

#159

Post by 15155 »

RossBencina wrote: post #94

No one seems to have mentioned the obvious question: Does Vivado already run under WINE? If not, are there any major blockers?

Even if it did, the Windows version is vastly inferior to the Linux version with regards to multithreading and other capabilities.

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

bborud wrote: post #150
Aurornis wrote: post #113

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? 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.

[deleted]
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