I may be in the wrong place, but this was the group that came up under the tag search ‘distro’. Can anyone point me in the right direction with respect to the best distros for working with small-scale System Verilog projects? If I am on the wrong board here, please feel free to nudge me in the right direction. Thanky kindly…
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Hey @Burtrand_AF_Paulie hmmm… I do not know of any small scale system Verilog research projects.
I also wouldn’t say that this is directly related to any LFX tool but is definitely a general discussion topic, so I’ll move it to General Discussions.
The only project I can think of that may know about other Verilog Research projects is Risc-V since Verilog is a standardized Hardware Description Language. Although I am pretty sure Risc-V does not use Verilog in any of their repositories maybe a member from their project can steer you in the right direction since Risc-V is an instruction set architecture for hardware.
@Megan_Lehn or @Brett_Preston are either of you aware of any Verilog research distros to help @Burtrand_AF_Paulie? Or would either of you be able to steer @Burtrand_AF_Paulie in the right direction here?
Hi @Burtrand_AF_Paulie ,
Thanks for asking!
From a Linux distribution perspective, you should be able to do any type of small scale System Verilog work without any problems on most distros. There are tools out there for compiling & basic simulation of System Verilog (like Verilator), even some open source RISC-V cores like Ibex for you to simulate. It may take some time working with System Verilog before understanding RISC-V cores is easy. 
Also have a look at open source hardware description languages (HDLs) as well (Chisel is a good example). There are some great cores out there like Boom from Berkeley which use Chisel rather than System Verilog.
Once you become fluent in working with HDLs you will need to start using simulation and other EDA tools that are proprietary. Once you get there, you’ll find that most of them support the more popular enterprise distros like RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). As an example, Xilinx has their Vivado design tools where you can use specific versions of distros like RHEL, CentOS, SLED, or Ubuntu.
In general with HDLs, the key is to start writing test benches and not worry about your setup until you know the kinds of projects you are going to be building. So start by installing a distro, opening up the terminal or text editor, writing some SV code, and compiling & simulating with tools like Verilator. Before you know it you’ll be writing complex test benches and it will be clear if you need a distro that supports the tools you need.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Stephano
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