alt Hacker NewsWhy is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Link to AMDs description of the new pricing being criticized: https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/adaptive-socs-and-f...
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?)
Good news for FOSS FPGA toolchains, I suppose. Eg https://f4pga.org/ for some kind of umbrella project.
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.
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.
No one seems to have mentioned the obvious question: Does Vivado already run under WINE? If not, are there any major blockers?
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.
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?
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.
Would be fun if Linux had some fight in it and turned off support for AMD chips.
One day held the world’s data centers are crashed and the next day we find the AMD C-suite has all resigned and all the leadership of the FPGA division. But it’s not enough now, to get Linux support back they have to make Vivado Linux exclusive and free at all levels.
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.
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.
Amd is gonna murder xilinx like intel did altera
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.
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
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.
Why would customers trust a company that does rug pull penny pinching moves like this? Tells me a lot.
This is terrible news for university users trying to professionalize their FPGA development with CI/CD. Which is probably the point of the change.
Hoping for a decent Chinese alternative to AMD and Intel...
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.
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.
Another one of those reflex-triggering moments:
They are all the same. Greedy little bitches.
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...
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...
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.
What’s next? Take away mouse support in the free tier? You could these fucking cretins with GPT2 and the company would flourish.
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.
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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.)
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