1.5 KiB
Installation of GHDL
The w11 project uses the open source VHDL simulator GHDL.
It used to be part of most distributions. Unfortunately the Debian maintainer for GHDL refused at some point to integrate GHDL into Debian 4 "Etch". GHDL was part of Debian 5 "Lenny", and again of Debian 6 "Squeeze", and was missing again in Debian 7 "Wheezy", Debian 8 "Jessy", and Debian 9 "Stretch". It was finally re-integrated in Debian 10 "Buster" (with V0.35) and Debian 11 "Bullseye" (with V1.0.0).
The glitch at Debian unfortunately lead to the removal of GHDL from Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid" up to 11.10 "Oneiric" included GHDL, while 12.04 LTS "Precise", 14.04 LTS "Trusty", 16.04 LTS "Xenial", and 18.04 "Bionic" didn't. It was finally re-integrated in Ubuntu in 20.04 LTS "Focal" (with V0.37) and 22.04 LTS "Jammy" (with V1.0.0).
However, the recent Debian packages do not include the VITAL libraries anymore,
see issue 1939910
and comment 899552686
The response was that they were removed due to license issues, see
comment 899576418. The recent Ubuntu packages also do not include the VITAL libraries.
The Debian/Ubuntu packages are therefore useless for w11 verification.
The only solution is to install GHDL from sources. That had been a bit quirky at times, but since V0.37 it works without any problems.