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Comment by rini17 | Hacker News Reader

Is there high performance FPGA that does not depend on proprietary bloated windows-only toolchain?

Every FPGA I have used has offered their proprietary bloated incredibly expensive toolchain on Linux.

There's icestorm but the supported hardware is not exactly high performance, IIRC the biggest chips supported have around 8K LUTs.

The proprietary bloated toolchains are free to use for lower end to mid range parts, even on Linux.

Yes but as as soon as you hit the limits of i.e. Quartus Lite it's $4k per seat per year. Then another $2k for Modelsim. And another $2k if you want the DSP package, etc.

That's on the super low end of the price spectrum.

Proprietary and bloated yes, but I believe both Xilinx and Altera both have software available for Linux, or am I wrong? At least I used Altera's suite on Linux once for a pilot project.

I recently installed Altera Quartus on Debian for a school project. It kept crashing after 2 seconds.

First result on google says quartus uses its own libcurl which is broken and you should copy the OS libcurl to /opt/altera/quartus/lin64/lib/whatever. Lots of issues like this.

I have used Xilinx's toolchain on Linux, though it was hard to get working. This was a few years ago.

They support Ubuntu now. Setup was just as easy as windows for me.

Actually the EDA industry for the longest time only hard working versions of their tools for "esoteric" cpu architectures like the Sparc and Solaris :). So yes by now they do support linux very well, some of the cadence and synopsis tools might not even work on windows (you need them for simulation, when Modelsim does not cut it). In any case EDA has been a Unix / Linux domain because it is so old and used to require really expensive unix workstations.

Supposedly some of the Xilinx 7 series FPGAs have been reverse engineered so there is a possibility of supporting them in Yosys (which is reasonable free toolchain). I've not been able to get much information about this, but you can check on the website: http://www.clifford.at/yosys/

From the FAQ at http://www.clifford.at/yosys/faq.html:

> 2. What synthesis targets are supported by Yosys?

> Yosys is retargetable and adding support for additional targets is not very hard. At the moment, Yosys ships with support for ASIC synthesis (from liberty cell library files), iCE40 FPGAs, Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs, Silego GreenPAK4 devices, and Gowinsemi GW1N/GW2A FPGAs.

> Note that in all this cases Yosys only performs synthesis. For a complete open source ASIC flow using Yosys see Qflow, for a complete open source iCE40 flow see Project IceStorm. Yosys Xilinx 7-Series synthesis output can be placed and routed with Xilinx Vivado.

[emphasis mine]

All vendors have linux toolchains. But they are still proprietary and bloated (at least after a point)

I believe this was on hn recently (uses icestorm as mentioned by others):

http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html

Last time I checked, vivado was available and fully functional on linux. Unless you are aware of a change in the last few minutes?

There's vivado on Linux and the open source toolchain for some lattice fpgas (icestorm)

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