Vivado Program Size for Basys 3

[Dereck]

I am curious if Digilent (or Basys 3 users) has thoughts on the best way to reduce the size of Vivado's installation.

                1)  Are there tricks to install newest version (2022.2) of Vivado to reduce installation size?

                2)  Or what version of Vivado might be considered the "most stable" and "moderate size" if the newest version is not really needed?

I work at a college and we are going to be using the Basys 3 boards (we finally upgrade from Basys 2) and I need to install Vivado on a bunch of lab machines.  Most of our engineering software (Matlab, Solidworks) only uses about 10-15GB of space, but Vivavdo 2022.2 ends up using 120GB of hard drive.  This is unfortunate as we just bought new lab computers and went with a 500GB hard drive because our engineering software had only been using 100GB total. 

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to install the newest version of Vivado and reduce the program size?   I am attaching a screenshot of things you can deselect (which I already tried in order to get it to 120GB).

I also installed Vivado 2020.1 on another machine and that uses 60GB.

Also, do folks have an opinion on which version of Vivado is the most stable for the Basys 3 board?  I think we are just doing basic logic stuff with the Basys 3 board.

Thanks for any help or thoughts,

Dereck

 

[JRys]

Hello,

Disabling support for the other FPGA series is a start. You could also delete the following folder \Xilinx\Vivado\2021.1\data\parts\xilinx\devint\vault\versal\ . It contains data files for a large Xilinx board that is not carried by Digilent. 

best regards,
John

[zygot]

AMD/Xilinx has never figured out how to distribute their tools. At this point, it's a lost cause. 120 GB downloads is just too big. I thought that the 65 GB download for Vivado 2019 plus the SDK was too big.

The sad truth is that the older versions of Vivado are just as good, or in some case better than the current version. Vivado 2018.3 will work just as well and is, I think, less than an 8 GB download. Early versions of the tools were distributed on a 4 GB DVD. The only problem with using older tool version is that Vivado keeps changing the syntax for constraints, IP behavior, database structure, etc. On the positive side, if you try and create a demo for your board that was created in an older version ( most are ) then everything pretty much works.

I have multiple PCs with older OSes and older FPGA vendor tools and often resort to using them to do work because trying to accommodate all bugs in the newer tools is just too much of a hassle.. it's quicker to just use the appropriate version of the tools.

You can save some space by not installing support for devices that you are using, but it's not as much space as you might hope for.

On thing that AMD/Xilinx can do is provide a non-GUI download option and better support script managed project development. There's a lot of really bad coding, bug creation, and tool bloat,  associated with the GUI. 

Whether this is a path that you want to consider is something for you to work on.

[Dereck]

This definitely helps.  It brought the Xilinx folder down from 123GB to 56GB.  Thanks a bunch!  The one program I have "blinking an led" seems to work just fine.

Interesting that this same folder you wanted me to delete was only about 6GB for the 2020.1 version and then became 66GB for the 2022.1 version.

It sure seems there are some unhappy folks out there with how "wasteful" and "inefficient" Xilinx is being around their program size.

Thanks John for this helpful advice!

[Dereck]

Thanks Zygot for your help and advice.  John's suggestion at least halved the final program size.  I think I can live with 60GB for this program for the next few years.  Although our students will not want to download it most likely on their own laptops.

[zygot]

AMD/Xilinx software development issues extend into it's tool distribution code. It's not uncommon for even the installation process to be messy.

It would certainly help if the installer was more clear about the cost of installing support of devices that you will never use. Some FPGA vendors make you install device support independently. At first glance this seems annoying, but in the end it probably saves time and effort for most users.

BTW. On my Win7 box, that is currently running so investigate an issue requiring older versions of Vivado, I notice that Vivado does simulation and the complete synthesis, implementation and bitstream generation a lot faster than Vivado 2019 or later on my Win10 box. We're talking about an i7-3930K with 16 GB ram outperforming a i9-9900K with 32 GB ram to do essentially the same tasks....

Before I had a broadband connection it sometimes took me, and this is no exaggeration, over a week of tries and retries to install Vivado 2019.1 on my Win10 box. Doesn't ADM/Xilinx realize that in some backward countries like the USA lots of people don;t have access to broadband internet? Edited November 14, 2022 by zygot

[JRys]

One last tidbit, I reinstalled Vivado 2022.2 once again using the options below. This time, the Versal folder is not installed and the overall installation size is about 50GB. Last time, I believe I left the two circled items enabled which ballooned the installation size to over 100GB.

best regards,

John