Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by Mr-Frog » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

ua709 wrote: post #164

akarambir wrote: post #2

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

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 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 micro…

> Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice.

I recently bought a hobby FPGA kit because I think the Von Neumann model is a beautiful innovation and I want to learn more about doing useful computation tasks from the lowest level logical components. I've always been interested in computers, but when I was in grade school the only useful computers I could afford were discarded PCs that I brought back to life with Linux distros. I now have a fulfilling career as a direct result of access to cheap hardware and open-source software when I had much more time and much less money than I do now. Decisions like AMD's are a long-term negative for the industry.

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

#222

Post by vitally3643 » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

boomskats wrote: post #80

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…

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.

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

#223

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, May 25, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #205

Dylan16807 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. Those should come with the processor. > People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free. Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product. Which is far from being "free" in the normal sense of the word. > It does deserve respect as a lot of…

>Those should come with the processor. They are useless for most people who buy the processor, even transitively. For people who will get called out of it, it makes sense to let companies charge for that value. >Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product. I feel this viewpoint does not value the work it takes to compile all of this information. Nor does it acknowledge how full docum…

I'm not at all calling it worthless. It's very valuable. But I think it's a value that every owner deserves access to. And for IP licensing? If it's mandatory companies will figure it out.

If your competitive advantage needs you to not even release documentation, does it really? Really? Well the societal benefits are more important, sorry.

And it's still not giving up work for free. It's telling companies to sell these two things together.

A physical programmer is different because those have a marginal cost.

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

#224

Post by genxy » Mon, May 25, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

hardolaf wrote: post #208

genxy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's just all of the device models. Even the OSS tools take up almost 20 GB of space once you get all of the suppported device models which is not many compared to what Vivado supports.

Why not both? Look at the installables from Cadence, they are full of redundant garbage, broken rpaths, etc. Tools that don't even need to support devices have 5-8GB compressed installables with 12-20GB of on disk space being taken up.

Horribly broken installers and a mess of environment variables needed to get the software to even run.

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

#225

Post by rowanG077 » Mon, May 25, 2026, 8:10 PM UTC

ginko wrote: post #62

kevmo314 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have to admit that I haven't looked too closely into this but my understanding is that place & route is essentially an NP hard optimization problem. Would it be possible to translate this into a SAT problem and solve it with a state of the art SAT solver?

Possible but the problem statement is generally way too large to throw into a SAT solver. You can do local problems with SAT though.

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

#226

Post by amluto » Mon, May 25, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

jkubic wrote: post #8

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 s…

About 25 years ago I did some work on Xilinx FPGAs. The hardware was nice. The ability to get them free (as a business development strategy) as a research user was nice [0]. The quality of the software stack was awful. The FPGAs were getting big enough that the synthesis process could need more 4GB of user memory, but the tools were barely functional on 64-bit systems of any sort, and this was far from the only problem.

It’s too bad that a vendor with only slightly worse hardware hasn’t eaten Xilinx’s lunch by having a genuinely pleasant development process. These companies aren’t selling synthesis tools — they’re selling hardware. Make the developers want to use it! (Intel, for all their faults, understands this.)

[0] It takes a special sort of incompetence to take 5 figures worth of fancy chips, stick them in a poorly packaged box, write only part of the address in it, and hope that FedEx will deliver it somewhere useful.

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

#227

Post by tardedmeme » Mon, May 25, 2026, 11:25 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #218

tardedmeme wrote: post #176

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.

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 understa…

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.

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

#228

Post by Doom4535 » Mon, May 25, 2026, 11:53 PM UTC

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).

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

#229

Post by account42 » Tue, May 26, 2026, 8:51 AM UTC

wormius wrote: post #169

dangus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were no uncivil comments in the whole thread. Also, corporations don’t have feelings. They aren’t people. They are legal structures. No comments made were directed at moderators or employees.

Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long. I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular instance contained "uncivil comments" (do the mods have the ability there to delete the comments if they are uncivil?)... But day in day out, on a mass level, it's such a goddamned drag, even if it i…

> Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.

Then don't take the job.

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

#230

Post by account42 » Tue, May 26, 2026, 8:59 AM UTC

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…

If customer support employees don't want to deal with angry customers they should take a job whose purpose is not dealing with unhappy customers. If you as a company have too many angry customers the response should be to fix your product/service, not to find excuses to ignore those customers.

All you're doing to forcing your customers to find other ways to fix their problems - either by finding someone higher paid than customer support and wasting their time instead or by going to a competitor and telling everyone to do the same.