Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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I recently had to burn an old fashioned eprom using a non-legacy PC and found it impossible to find a USB connected linux compatible eprom burner. Yes if you have a parallel port on your laptop (not since 2003 or so?) there's the willem programmer. Yes there's a company in .de selling a USB burner with Ubuntu software but the shipping and handling to the states was kind of extreme. Why do they charge $75 or whatever it was from .de when Seeed studios charges approx nothing from .cn? So closed source problems are hardly limited solely to high tech FPGAs. Abandoning FPGAs doesn't mean you'll eliminate closed source from your life, it just means you'll eliminate FPGAs from your life...

Also I suspect you do not have a copy of the firmware inside the microcontroller that runs your mouse, or your PC 8042 keyboard controller, or innumerable microcontrollers thru the machine, so either you are already OK with using "some" closed source or don't have a full picture of your whole system. Pessimism is your friend in this case and the situation is probably much worse than you think. I ALWAYS prioritize open source above all other criteria for obvious reasons, but when its not available I do my best with what I can get... Its an engineering background thing... Much as I'd love to ideally make everything outta aerospace carbon fiber and titanium, but lets face it, my house is made mostly outta wood and my car outta steel.

There's a difference between a development environment and the code that runs in a random device...

The problem is not just closed source software (which I don't like and try not to use) but a lack of documentation of the architecture and bitstream formats. I program for a living, but wouldn't for the life of me work with a closed source compiler for an unknown architecture with no/incomplete documentation. Many people may be ok with this though (see for example, some shader compilers for embedded GPUs).

There's a reason processor manufactures release all info about instructions sets and that in turn allows a lot of projects like gcc, llvm, v8, luajit, etc. to support them.

I would think that opening up the details of this technology would spur a lot of innovation regarding FPGAs and HDLs, both in academia and in the industry.

The difference is necessity. I need a computer for my work and it would be infeasible to use 100% open source hardware. I don't need to play with FPGAs, but I would really like to. Hence me continually coming back to it, even if I haven't made the leap yet.

"The difference is necessity."

That has to be carefully defined. My point with the eprom anecdote was that you're stuck with closed source if you put a z80 core and some rom/ram/decode logic in a FPGA and do a synthetic SoC and merely avoiding FPGA and doin' it with discrete Z80 and eprom and sram and some glue isn't going to save you, because in 2013 using PC hardware you pretty much need a closed source windows only USB eprom programmer. So if you're stuck with closed source doing a hobby project, at least do something "cool" and use the FPGA.

To do "about the same thing" but open source there are several completely open source alternatives that would result in CPU controlled I/O ports being wiggled. Avoiding closed source is not just as simple as saying "no FPGAs" or closed source is solely a disease of FPGAs. for example it took years as I recall before the Propeller had a non-windows/dos stack, although the BST works pretty well now.

Confusing the issue, if you just want to play around with Verilog as a language or abstract technology, Icarus is free software part of the GnuEDA project. Obviously that's playing with simulation not silicon, but it is possible. So you don't have to entirely avoid FPGA technology.

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