alt Hacker NewsWhat you say is ridiculous.
The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the vendors like AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products.
A few old AMD FPGAs have been reversed engineered, e.g. some ARTIX-7, so for them there is no need for the rather bad AMD tools, but for most AMD formerly Xilinx FPGAs it is impossible to create better tools for lack of documentation.
As long as AMD refuses to provide the technical documentation required to use their products, it should have been a legal obligation to at least provide basic tools that allows the buyer of such products to actually use "FPGAs", i.e. to "field-program" them, as the name of the sold product claims.
Like many other FPGA developers, I could write myself better FPGA development tools than what AMD provides, if I had access to the complete FPGA technical documentation to which only a few big companies have access, a restriction whose only possible purpose is to prevent competition in the FPGA market.
If AMD had documented the exact format of the bit stream required to program each model of their FPGAs and the complete timing consequences of each synthesis choice, nobody would need any FPGA simulation or synthesis tool provided by AMD in Vivado.
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>AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products.
Because people haven't offered enough money to have a copy privately shared. This is on the Linux community for not ponying up enough money to fund this properly to have a reasonable release date.
The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the "Linux community" is completely inadequate in comparison to what's needed.
Reverse engineering tools are pretty good these days. I have no doubt that a dedicated hacker could sit down with Ghidra and the free Windows version of Vivado for two years and come out with something that compiles FPGAs well enough. But there's a shortage of the kinds of people who would do that, they're all busy doing other things, so it doesn't get done.
More easily, someone could get the free Windows version to run on Linux. If it doesn't already work in Wine, they could figure out and implement the needed Wine patches. If Vivado has a DRM scheme they could break it (potentially very difficult), if not then it should be straightforward. Nobody seems to be doing that, either.
The same applies to things like the Nvidia drivers.
In the past, freedom RE projects were handicapped by needing to maintain a Chinese wall. Now it's become obvious you don't need a Chinese wall, you can just straight up decompile someone else's software and use that as a reference as long as you don't copy it directly and you don't make it too obvious to the copyright owners what you're doing. Keeping your anonymity for this sort of project is easier than ever before too. Yet we see less freedom RE projects, not more. Why is that?
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