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How To set up Vivado on MacOS

rscasny

I had someone contact me about the need to set up Vivado on a Mac. I don't get this question very often. I don't think it's directly supported.

If you have set it up on a Mac, I'd be interested in getting your comments/experiences to pass onto him.

Thanks.

  • Vmware with Ubuntu copy would be the way to go on a Mac.

    Vivado supports only a handful of Linux distributions only (mostly RHEL, Ubuntu)

  • in reply to dimiterk

    It also needs to be on an Intel Mac; I'm not aware of M1 Macs that can (easily) run Intel VMs.

  • Set up a VMWare Fusion VM running Ubuntu 16 or 18.  This will only work well if the host Mac has 4 or more cores, more than 16 GB of RAM and more than 100GB storage available to the VM.  If the Mac cannot devote those resources to the VM at runtime, then the client would be better off getting a PC Laptop with a recent  i7, 32GB RAM,  500GB storage and setting it up on Ubuntu 16 or 18 and using it as a dedicated platform for Vivado.  GPU resources have no appreciable impact on Vivado's performance on the host.

  • in reply to bradfordmiller

    VMWare Fusion might run on an M1(Apple says most x64 software will run on the M1), but performance in the context of trying to run a Linux OS and a massive bloatware like Vivado is probably a deal breaker.

  • in reply to Metaforest

    An M1 VMWare Fusion *does* run on an M1, but it will only run OS's compiled for ARM. And I'm not aware of a version of Linux that has Rosetta capabilities to run x86 under ARM (yet), but as you say even if it did... I'm running Parallels and a 20.4 version of Ubuntu (ARM) but no current path to run x86 on that. 

    Ref: communities.vmware.com/.../2868125

  • A separate laptop as mentioned above or even a separate small server (e.g. Intel NUC) can be really handy. I run anything that I cannot run on my laptop (or don't want to run on my laptop) on the separate Intel NUC and remotely connect to it (e.g. SSH for command line, or Remote Desktop for graphical apps). It is possible to use a free copy of VMware ESXi to have many virtual machines on the Intel NUC, and switch them on/off remotely, saving resources/energy/space, great for home use. Info on that is on the VMware website, and performance impact of ESXi is low. The Intel NUC is a very tiny box (just a few times the size of a Pi), but there are other small PC options too.

    I've not tried it, but another option is Vivado on Amazon Web Services (AWS), since Xilinx offers that. The cost is $0.55 per hour currently (just need to remember to shut it down afterwards : )

  • in reply to Metaforest

    I run Vivado and Vitis on a Ubuntu VM (running on Parallels) with 8192MB of RAM and 2 Processors devoted to the VM - this on my MacBook Pro (2Ghz quad core i5 with 16GB ram.)  Simultaneously, I run other apps on my Mac, admittedly not resource hogs though.  I've had no performance or other issues with doing so and I think it's a perfectly adequate setup for small/medium scale usage of these apps.  Going for broke with them, is almost certainly going to require a high-spec, dedicated PC to do so, even if it's MacOS based using virtualisation.  Virtualbox could be used as a free virtualisation engine if they don't want to lump out for Fusion or Parallels.  Elsewhere on E14 I've described how to set up Ubuntu to run Vivado/Vitis.