Well, it's now Snow Leopard, but I too would love to run Xilinx tools natively on my Mac. 

I guess I'm just registering interest FWIW, I know I have to run in a virtualised environment right now (Ubuntu would be my choice here, though that's not a supported platform right now either).

Of course the Mac is doubtless a minority platform, and particularly so historically.  However, it is pretty popular amongst the technical computing crowd, and I've noticed that a few other hardware related tools are now providing (or are in the process of making) Mac versions.

Anyway, for now it's back to my VMWare image...  :-)

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evansl wrote:

Well, it's now Snow Leopard, but I too would love to run Xilinx tools natively on my Mac. 

I guess I'm just registering interest FWIW, I know I have to run in a virtualised environment right now (Ubuntu would be my choice here, though that's not a supported platform right now either).

 

Of course the Mac is doubtless a minority platform, and particularly so historically.  However, it is pretty popular amongst the technical computing crowd, and I've noticed that a few other hardware related tools are now providing (or are in the process of making) Mac versions.

 

Anyway, for now it's back to my VMWare image...  :-)

 

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I agree that a Mac version is required. After all, it's Unix, and the Xilinx tools are basically Unix apps driven by tcl scripts. It should be easier to build for OS X than for Cygwin on Windows!

Theoretically, Snow Leopard could offer an excellent foundation for a design tool such as ISE - I'm thinking Grand Central Dispatch, maybe even OpenCL for a routing/placing algorithm, as well as leveraging the great GUI.

However, that's getting _way_ too far ahead.  As you suggest a first step is just offering a mere port, and indeed they could just move all the stuff across, do the inevitable patching here and there (Linux to BSD, library versions, etc.) and then offer support.  

For the simplest way forward, X11 is shipped on the Mac OS X system disk and it wouldn't be a killer to ask technical people (like FPGA designers) to do that simple install.  There's a huge repository of UNIX-y/Linux-y libraries in the form of DarwinPorts and Fink, so I'd imagine getting a platform/environment close to the one they rely on in SUSE or Redhat would be possible.

Still, it comes down to motivation.  Who knows how many paying ISE users would use a Mac version, or indeed how many new users would be swayed toward Xilinx if they offered Mac support.  It's particularly hard to determine the size of the market when many of the target users are off, by necessity, running other versions under virtualisation.  Of course, the forum is one place some desire for this can be expressed, but this will only pick up a few vocal ones and those who happen to be cruising the forum at the time.