Any ETA on OSX?

FrontPanel
1

I was wondering if it would be possible to get an idea of when OSX support will be available? I’ll offer to do extensive beta testing of the OSX modules if/when they are ready.

Thanks,
–Nate

2

While we have had success on OS X, it is not something we are actively pursuing right now. With the lack of FPGA development tools on OS X, it is less likely that users are interested in a Mac version. If you feel otherwise, I’d like to see some activity on this topic.

Presently, Mac and Linux support is based on the libusb package which is not currently well supported since they are doing a major rewrite of the package. It also has several problems with a few distributions of Linux making it a nightmare to support.

3

It is true that OSX currently lacks support of commercial EDA tools, especially vendor tools. Sadly, however, whenever anyone is asked if their tool will be adapted to OSX, the response is “there arn’t any EDA tools for OSX yet, so we’re not going to persue them.” Funny how the answer and the problem are one and the same! :stuck_out_tongue:

Luckily, the large majority of the open source EDA tools (Icarus, GHDL, FreeHDL, the GEDA suite, JHDL, Alliance, etc) are portable, and are up and running well on OSX.

While I’m not holding my breath to see “Synopsys announces OSX version,” Opal Kelly actually HAS made such a statement (
http://www.opalkelly.com/products/frontpanel.html
says “Support for Linux and Mac OS X is coming soon.”) and was even a contributing factor to my initial excitement about the XEM and Opal in general. Don’t get me wrong, 90% of it was the “hey, that’s a neat idea and would make my debug and verification cycles SO much shorter!” factor :wink: However, a good 5% was “Wow, OSX support too!”

I guess I’m just a little saddened, and feel like I got my hopes up all for not. Even a buggy version would be better then nothing. You could even consider open-sourcing it, and hoping that some determined/dedicated users would help fix up some of the bugs. I know that I would certainly contribute.

All well, wishfull thinking, I suppose. Back to windows I go.

Thank you, anyways, for an otherwise brilliant product,
–Nate