Future of FPGA AMI

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Hello all,

I'm interested to hear if AWS is willing to share their plans on future version of OS that will be used for FPGA AMI. Currently, FPGA AMI is running on CentOS 7 (or Amazon Linux 2, which is based on CentOS), which is already pretty ancient, and will see end-of-support in 2024. Also, RHEL has announced that CentOS releases will stop in currently known form, and they'll start with "rolling releases". This all leads me to believe that AWS will, at some point, stop using CentOS 7, and switch to either rolling release CentOS, or perhaps some other Linux distro.

By reading the documentation and this forum, I've concluded that using Ubuntu with Vivado is currently not supported on AWS Instances, but Ubuntu is able to handle AWS PCIe drivers, meaning that FPGA designs synthesized on CentOS 7 are available to be used on Ubuntu. Is this still valid statement?

asked 3 years ago321 views
3 Answers
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Hi jelicicm,

We provide free Xilinx tools on our FPGA Developer AMI's on Centos 7 and AL2. Xilinx also has a list of supported OS's for Vivado: https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx2021_1/ug973-vivado-release-notes-install-license.pdf. Based on that list, Vivado on Ubuntu would be supported on AWS if you bring your own install and license as we currently do not provide an Ubuntu based FPGA Developer AMI.

For building AFI's and FPGA designs targeting AWS F1, our Developer Kit would be able to run with any of those OS's if they are Linux based. Our developer kit will not run on Windows machines.

As far as running your accelerator on an F1 instance goes, that support is determined by the drivers you use. If you use XRT, Our SDK will work on most Linux installations to let you run AFI management commands on F1. You can absolutely use your AFI's created on Centos 7 on an F1 instance running Ubuntu.

With this in mind, would you say your primary development OS is Ubuntu? We are constantly evaluating our offerings and we can take this as a feature request to offer our FPGA Developer AMI on Ubuntu if that better suits our customer needs.

Hope this helps, and let us know if you have more questions.

-Deep

Deep_P
answered 3 years ago
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Hello Deep, thanks for the quick reply.

Yes, I'm aware AWS offers free Xilinx tooling, accompanied with AL2 (which is based on CentOS 7). My question was - since I suspect AWS's plan is to always have a "Xilinx tool AMI" (such as the one you're mentioning), what OS will that AMI be based on once CentOS 7 support stops? To have an access to Xilinx tools is great, so my company plans to use this in the long run.

I've just tried to start a new instance with Ubuntu 20.04, installed aws-fpga/sdk_setup.sh on it, loaded an AGFI and done some basic FPGA tests, which proved functional, so PCIe communication works on Ubuntu too, as expected. So its completely possible to build an AGFI on AL2 instance, and then load it up in Ubuntu and use it, just like you indicated.

My company's primary development OS is Ubuntu, so it's handy to use Ubuntu on AWS too. I don't see why its better to use Xilinx tools on CentOS then on Ubuntu, but you probably have reasons on why you opted to go in that direction.

answered 3 years ago
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Hi jelicicm,

This is great feedback for us to take into account for our future plans. We don't have anything to share as of now, but we will reach out to you once we have more information!

-Deep

Deep_P
answered 3 years ago

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