Classic confinement request for the ‘nextpnr-kintex’ snap

store-requests
1

nextpnr-kintex is a set of command line tools comprising a FPGA toolchain. It is vital that those command line utilities can be used flexibly. For example I keep all my development files on a separately mounted partition, so home access would not be enough to compile FPGA bitstreams. Also the toolchain needs to access chip database files to support various FPGA models, which can be user generated and located in the system (eg /opt, /usr/local/share)

2

As per the Process for reviewing classic confinement snaps nextpnr-kintex requires access to files from the host system, in particular from /usr, and so has a requirement for classic confinement. Also this appears to be a compiler and so fits within one of the supported categories for classic confinement.

As such, the requirements for classic confinement are understood - @advocacy could you please perform publisher vetting?

3

@hansfbaier Could you please share the official page for your software/project?

4

https://github.com/kintex-chatter

5

@hansfbaier Is there a page/source that does not self-reference perhaps?

6

The purpose of this package is to provide convenient early access to the ongoing effort to add Kintex support to nextpnr-xilinx and prjxray:

https://github.com/kintex-chatter/nextpnr-xilinx The backend of nextpnr-xilinx is prjxray, which provides the bitstream documentation which is consumed by nextpnr-xilinx: https://github.com/kintex-chatter/prjxray

Of course the effort to both projects will be upstreamed in due course,

but to facilitate this process we need a mechanism to conveniently deliver the current status to users who want to test the toolchain and give us feedback.

Best regards, Hans

7

Sure thing. The problem is that the repos have no public members, and I have no way to associate that to upstream. You can PM me the upstream info if you like, or involve someone from the upstream projects.

8

@hansfbaier hey,

Any further update about an official web site for nextpnr-kintex?

9

Hello,

thanks for asking, our community webpage is the github organization kintex-chatter on GitHub.

Nevertheless, I since this is especially a customized early access distribution of three upstream projects (yosys, nextpnr-xilinx and prjxray), I decided against making it available regularly on the snap store. I think the administrative overhead is just not with the hassle. I opted for a shell script instead (project toolchain-installer on kintex-chatter)

Best regards,

Hans

10

Hi @hansfbaier,

Thanks for letting us know.

Would you mind providing details about this? Is this because of the official web site requested?

11

There are several reasons:

  1. I supplied the project website and the upstream project websites, but for some reason which I could not understand, that was not enough
  2. The request was banned from the forum with no possibility for me to reply/ask/appeal, with some shady reason I cannot recall now. That really turned me off. It got reinstated later, but then I already had made up my mind.
  3. Having to jump through the hoops for --classic and a couple of aliases I need
  4. The build servers having a different directory structure, so my snap build script won’t work there like on my ubuntu machine

compared to all of that this is much simpler:

I just need a convenient way to have early adopters use my code, because upstream moves so very slowly.