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
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
Obviously, I believe that a decision like that made by AMD now is a much more "unacceptable abusive behavior" than any kind of verbal insult ever known to mankind.
This kind of decision is a masked price rise of the AMD FPGAs that applies only to small businesses and individuals, while the big quasi-monopolistic companies are not affected, which will make competing with them even more difficult.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
Many HNers promised to pay if developers bring their software to Linux - will that actually happen?
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.
This is just hurting students and hobbyists.
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.
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.
They do still support Linux... but only if you give them money.
Windows cannot provide feature parity for workloads that require cross compiling, AMD could at least support RHEL like the old days.
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 want a robust open-source ecosystem where anyone can take my hardware projects and modify them without needing to deal with licensing friction.
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.
https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr
As someone actively working on nextpnr support for a fairly new FPGA architecture, it really is amazing that we have something like that in the open source world.
YosysHQ are one of my favorite companies to exist.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.