Uggghhh. Thankfully, I’ve never even heard of this program, but this sets a poor precedent for their future endeavors
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Vivado is software for designing hardware on an FPGA. AMD bought out Xilinx, one of the big FPGA manufacturers, a few years back. FPGAs are basically programmable digital circuits: you configure a series of internal logic gates to represent the function of a circuit with memory, data busses, registers, gates, etc. In this fashion, an FPGA could be programmed to function like a CPU, a radio, a video encoder, or nearly any other piece of digital hardware. Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.
The thing with FPGA software is that there are no open source alternatives. FPGAs have so many complicated blobs and signing keys and proprietary IP blocks that your only choice is to use the manufacturer's offering.
It is insane to me that something as conceptually basic as FPGAs can even be made proprietary at all, much less that being the universal state of them.
The world of FPGA is full of proprietary hardware and software blocks sadly. I haven’t dabbled since being a student but I remember finding it extremely jarring how on one hand you basically could write whatever hardware blocks you wanted (the freedom is comparable to learning programming all over again but in a fundamentally different way), but also you had super optimized “IP blocks” of software you can pull in like a paid library that you had to license. These blocks make the damn chip much more powerful for those of us not willing to write a fucking CPU, what the fuck do you mean DLC for the chip on my lab table?
Vivado was a bit of a pain but not too bad as far as proprietary software goes. There’s more steps involved than just burning a .hex to a regular microcontroller, the debugging is different, I get it, another program makes sense.
Personally I don’t write much code these days but I find myself yearning for like MS Visual Studio 2008. If I ever want to go back to programming on the side I will probably have to figure out my IDE situation from scratch. VS Community seems nice but there’s a lot of unnecessary features and of course Microslop’s grubby fingers all over it
for those of us not willing to write a fucking CPU
There's insane maniacs who've written fucking CPUs in CSS, Minecraft, and Conway's game of life, among many other environments not intended for writing fucking CPUs.
Can't some insane maniac simply write a fucking CPU for FPGAs and release it as open source?
Plenty of insane maniacs have released lots of more useless stuff as open source, why not this?
(Using insane maniac as a compliment here; the world would be a much more boring and unenjoyable place without insane maniacs willing to waste their time making it a better or at least more interesting place.)
My fucking CPU comment was not that serious. The projects we were doing were just that. I have a notebook full of diagrams that I understand less and less every year.
It was just a bit shitty that the CPU part wasn’t included with the chip itself. IIRC the nicer ones had hardware CPUs/CPU cores anyway.
I meant it more as “hey I need to do this simple task, better write a processor real quick” which is not convenient. I’m almost certain there are dozens of FOSS RISC cores that could be burned to all of Xilinx’s FPGAs. It’s theoretically hardware agnostic but these are super popular parts.
The FPGA itself is just the chip. You can find them pre-installed in development boards though, but these are more expensive. But at least they might of a microprocessor if that's what you want.
And if you're fed up with Xilinx, check out Lattice semiconductors. They have a somewhat more open ecosystem
There are in fact parts that have CPUs included. However these aren't always the best route. Sometimes you don't want a CPU in the design at all, since software is SLOW compared to RTL designs for certain applications (DSP, Data acquisition, etc).
Xilinx has a number of SOC parts that bundle ARM cores alongside FPGA fabric, and they're very tightly coupled to make passing data between them very efficient. These include the Zynq and Versal families.
There are already some open source cores out there, including NEORV32. There are also closed source ones, like Xilinx's Microblaze IP. Which comes in both ARM32/64 variants, as well as RISC-V now.
(Using insane maniac as a compliment here; the world would be a much more boring and unenjoyable place without insane maniacs willing to waste their time making it a better or at least more interesting place.)
Thank you Sir/Maam, a better day was had here due to this...
VS Codium is an open source fork of VS Code.
Geany doesn't seem bad either but I haven't used it for much
VS Code is a vastly different user experience to Visual Studio though. Not exactly what they seem to be after.
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Singularly fucking stupid IP gated moronicity. So much profit available before custom chips. Why?
There is a world of difference between what is "conceptually basic" and what the practical reality is. The tools aren't open source because there's a lot of secret sauce the vendors want to keep secret. The OSS development efforts are making progress, but it's a long, slow, difficult slog.
Thanks, that’s basically what I gathered from the article but I didn’t do any further research.
Lattice device support some open toolchains, or relatively open compared to the big two. Or something like that, never got to work with them yet.
Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.
True, but that is not the only thing they are useful for; e.g. many high end measurement instruments ship with FPGAs so they can get improvements after release for functionality where implementing it in software would be too slow.
Very true. I believe FPGAs are also popular for aerospace applications, since it's cheaper to design and patch programmable hardware than to design and physically install ASICs.
Are Lattice FPGAs any better? I know they have their own software suite but I'm pretty sure there are free versions
Read the entire article, despite not having heard about Vivado previously. I wouldn’t be surprised if a certain company ending in ~~soft~~ slop is somehow involved.
The thing that makes sense to me (purely speculative, no real info to back this) is that Microslop isn’t happy about losing money and the user base, so they are pushing their hardware partners to force users back to the platform.
Redis did exactly this back in March 2024, dropping its long-standing BSD license for the more restrictive dual licensing model, and the blowback was severe enough that the community forked it into Valkey almost immediately.
Sounds like this is probably the best approach and outcome for the Vivado community and software. The end of the article recommends either joining in the discussion on AMD’s forums (which only seems to be getting stonewalled) or joining the growing number of people on hacker news.
That's the second-best approach. The best approach is for it to be copyleft instead of permissively-licensed to begin with.
I don’t disagree, I meant given the current situation. Obviously copyleft would be preferred and should be encouraged.
For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
This is AMD's marketing decision.
Kind Regards, Anatoli Curran, Xilinx/AMD Forum Moderator
Translation, we looked at the books and thought this could make us more money.
I honestly think this is it, and it's not arbitrary. I think it's because really any build server will be running Linux (either natively or via Docker). AMD/Xilinx probably thinks "Build Servers are an advanced use case, so not covered under the free license"
I don't know the exact reason but yeah. "Marketing" departments don't get to just make fundamental product decisions in any company I've ever interacted with.
IMO it’s fair to read this as an NSA/eyes move. AMD is embedded in the western global mass surveillance architecture and by closed sourcing they can hide NSA back doors more easily.
Fact is the west is locking down all computing and doesn’t want there to be anywhere to flee for hobbyists or the Chinese. This also prevents the Chinese from benefiting from these tools if they slap sanctions on.
I would like to preface this with the fact that I hate this new change. As a professional FPGA Engineer, who has exclusively used Xilinx parts for most of my career, I figured I'd offer my two cents.
Vivado was never open source to begin with. So I don't see how this would allow more back doors to be in the program, and I'm also not sure what you mean by a back door in this context. Do you mean making Vivado install back doors into the bitstreams themselves? If so, this would be difficult to do given there are independent tools out there that allow you to verify what is in the compiled netlist (which is an intermediate step in a design) vs the HDL (Hardware Description Language, the type of Language that is used to program FPGAs, main ones are VHDL and Verilog). There's also some new tools coming out do compare the bitstream against the net list. With these tools, you can all but guarantee there aren't any back doors or Trojans in the design.
Vivado is also already export controlled IIRC. At the very least, you've always had to input your country/address/etc due to controls on it. I'm in the USA, so it's never been a problem, so I don't really know what happens for people in, say, China. It might just be for logging/tracking purposes, and then in the future it could get locked down, so you may be right on that count.
Those Xilinx USB programmers are such a pain in the ass to use. They tend to work fine like 95% of the time but the other 5% just refuse to work.
That's what you get when it's not open source...
I am very much pro open-source, but these are highly specialized tools for a very niche market so it is atleast somewhat understandable. Unfortunately we are not blessed with open source toolchains like software developers even though there are some steps in that direction. Because it is such a niche market, it is like the software space from 20-30 years ago. Proprietary tools and compilers were pretty common back then and for some microcontroller architectures outside of ARM and RISCV they still are I think.
Dealing with this kind of shit was one of the reasons we completely dropped xilinx. Apart from that they were very unhelpful and unfriendly.
What do you mean by this kind of shit? I am in the FPGA space for quite some time now but I don't think something like this happened before. When did you leave and what are you using now? I agree with you on the support. If there isn't an (unpaid) member in the community forum or on some other platform you are pretty much fucked. I never used another vendor, so I can't say if it is different there though.
Xilinx has turned asshole against us, because their reseller misreported numbers. Our boss was fuming after the conference and told me to find another vendor.
We are now using Efinix chips and their forum and direct support is wonderful. I had discussions with their tool developers about UI design decisions that actually led to improvements. Imagine trying to get something like that done with Xilinx - they have grown too big to care unless you buy millions of chips.
Nice, seems like it was a good decisions. Do you miss anything from the Xilinx world?
The free simulator.
What do you use instead ? As a student, the new prices are completely unaffordable, and I am not going to use Windows 😓
We switched the whole line to Efinix. One disadvantage though: They don't supply a simulator.
As someone who had the misfortune to work with Vivado before. I really hope that this might drive a new company/independent dev team to make something better and we get something good out of this.
I mean it is a huge loss for FOSS since it is one of the only "IDEs" (* if you can even call this buggy bullshit that*) that is free. But it really is shit.
I really liked Verilog but I could never work with it for longer than an hour before some new Vivado bug needed a restart or I got sick from interacting with the interface.
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