The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD...

Answering the actual question seems not a high priority

When they do not have any justifiable answer, or don't want to answer, but need to keep the facade on, they'll sidestep and tell you how hard they are working on something, and how many unrelated things they've archived.

- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people

On the other hand - this is now an opportunity for Linux community to show that they are actually able to fund development of software for their platform, right?

Many HNers promised to pay if developers bring their software to Linux - will that actually happen?

Tbh, I think they should just charge for the chips and keep the software free.

This x10000

I can get parts, they're part of a BOM that gets approved, but getting POs approved for software is a pain in the ass. Been considering switching next gen stuff to microchip.

Have you tried docker or WSL2. Modern virtualization should make it possible to seamlessly run Linux while in Windows.

I love the way they buried the “we are no longer supporting an entire operating system” in a small missing tick, half way down the page…

For reverse engineering, you still need access to the FPGA tools provided by the vendor, to see what changes in the bitstream when you change the design.

If the bitstream is encrypted, you will not see the changes, so the only way is to reverse engineer the Vivado executables.

You do not need only the bitstream, but you also need a huge amount of timing parameters. In theory, they could be obtained by fuzzing, but that would require a huge amount of executions of the Vivado tools. So again the most plausible method is to reverse engineer the Vivado executables, to get the timing parameter database.

In some countries that should be legal, as such reverse engineering might become the only way to use the AMD FPGAs that one buys legally.

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 took Efinix. They have cute FPGA with memory in one package. It saves me lots of time for routing the board.

So much wrong with your comment.

1: The software is not free. There is what essentially amounts to a free trial. This free trial used to support Windows and Linux. Now the free version only supports Windows, only the paid tiers work on Linux.

2: The software is what amounts to a hardware-specific compiler/IDE. AMD sells the hardware, with healthy margins. Asking "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain [Vivado] .. for free" is the same as asking, "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their OpenGL drivers for free". They have a solid revenue stream from hardware sales that's enabled by the software.

3: Maintaining a free Linux version is close to 0 additional cost. They already need to maintain a free tier because they provide that to Windows, they already need to maintain Linux support because they provide that for the paid tiers. The only extra maintenance would be whatever edge case bugs occur only on the free tier and only when compiled for Linux.

> I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux

Here I agree with you - Linux users shouldn't expect any special privileges here. But we're not asking for special treatment, we're asking that we continue to be given the same options as Windows users, just as we were for all previous versions of the software.

What people are objecting to is that for the latest version (and future versions) of the software an existing free tier has been withdrawn from Linux users - and only from Linux users.

First of all, you already pay for the FPGAs, and the only reason why you pay for them is that they are "Field-Programmable" GAs. To be able to use the product that you own, as advertised, you MUST have the AMD software tools, because they refuse to provide the technical documentation that would allow the use of FPGAs without vendor-provided tools.

It is abusive to request an additional big payment in order to use the bought product as intended. This additional payment for the FPGA programming tool is negligible for big companies, which also get great discounts in the price of the FPGAs they buy, but it hurts any small companies and individuals who want to use FPGAs.

These kind of policies never increase in any way the revenue of a company like AMD but they ensure that any market where such policies are frequent become dominated by a few quasi-monopolies, instead of having a healthy competition that keeps prices low for computers, as it existed in electronics until around a quarter of century ago.

Their FPGA development software is not an independent product, but it is a part of the FPGAs they are selling, like the boxes in which such FPGAs are packaged.

Your claim that they get $0 for their software is as ridiculous as the claim that Intel can no longer sell boxed CPUs, because they get $0 for the cardboard and plastic packages of their CPUs.

For now, only the Linux version of the FPGA tools has been discontinued, the free and worse Windows version still exists, so what you say in the last version of your comment is still wrong, because the Windows users are not monetized, yet.

They are selling hardware.

You'd think removing friction on the software side for someone who already bought their hardware would be in their interest. Especially for students and hobbyists, who will want use what they already know once they enter the industry.

Maintaining support for Windows is free?