Comment by danhor
4 hours ago
> Nothing stops someone from taking the free Windows Vivado and making it run on Linux
The EULA and the fact that the linux versior runs faster & has fewer bugs.
> just the device-dependent backend would be a major improvement and the frontend and optimizer could be shared with other toolchains
That's yosys and it's used by smaller commercial vendors.
> or reverse engineering then bitstream format for these FPGAs
Getting the timing is the hard part (+ good routing afterwards). The bitstream format has AFAIK mostly been reversed. 7 series has mediocre support , but US, US+ and Versal doesn't (probably because they're too expensive for personal usage).
This. If AMD / Xilinx would publish the documentation what you would need to use their chips, probably very few would use Vivado or ISE.