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Federico Runco federunco

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  • Politecnico di Torino
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Running Quartus + Questa on Apple Silicon

The current methods to run an Intel FPGA workflow on Apple Silicon involve two possibile approaches:

  • Using a WoA Virtual Machine: Performance is terrible (already in amd64 Windows platforms is terrible, adding two virtualization layers on top of it leads to eternal compilation times) + space wasted for all the Microsoft bloatware
  • Using a Docker Container: Performance is better than WoA, but the USB drivers are not working

Running Linux on UTM with Rosetta enabled should tackle these problems

Disclaimer for Baremetal installation

This guide could possibly work also when installing Debian directly on the Mac with Asahi Linux, but it is not recommended for beginners: with the standard installation procedure the Linux Kernel uses a default page size of 16K, and the rosetta binary is not designed to run with this page size. By recompiling the Linux Kernel to use 4K page sizes it should work flawlessly, but expect slower perfomance and/or higher power usage