linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 00/16] Intel FPGA Device Drivers

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Date:   Tue, 11 Apr 2017 12:38:10 -0700
From:   "Luebbers, Enno" <enno.luebbers@...el.com>
To:     Jerome Glisse <jglisse@...hat.com>
Cc:     Wu Hao <hao.wu@...el.com>, atull@...nel.org,
        moritz.fischer@...us.com, linux-fpga@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, luwei.kang@...el.com,
        yi.z.zhang@...el.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/16] Intel FPGA Device Drivers

Hi Jerome,

On Thu, Apr 06, 2017 at 04:27:00PM -0400, Jerome Glisse wrote:

> Do we have an open source toolchain to generate the FPGA configuration
> (bitstream) ? As it is required for the GPU sub-system that any driver
> API must comes with open source userspace.

As far as I know, no FPGA vendor currently provides an open-source version of
their FPGA synthesis tools - there are, however, free (as in beer) versions
available for download that can be used for generating FPGA bitstreams. Also,
there are a number of projects to replace parts of the vendor tools with open
alternatives (yosys comes to mind, which I believe recently added initial
support for synthesizing logic for Intel FPGAs).

As an aside, we are also working on an open-source user-space library that would
allow you to use this driver to load existing accelerator bitstreams as well as
enumerate and access accelerators present in the system. This would enable
workflows where users have access to e.g. a library of FPGA accelerator
bitstreams and want to write applications that take advantage of these
accelerators, even without having access to an FPGA synthesis tool.

Thanks
- Enno