HDL Containers

Images are organised in collections and built for multiple architectures. A collection is a set of images which share a common ancestor; a base layer. Having images with a common ancestor allows reducing bandwidth and disk usage when pulling several of them. See docs.docker.com: About storage drivers | Images and layers.

Collections:

Architectures:

Each image is published to and .

However, the ARCHITECURE and COLLECTION are optional because:

By default, latest development versions (branches master|main) of tools are built. Then, smoke tests are executed and, if successful, the corresponding images are updated in the registries. However, some specific tools are not built from sources, but installed through system package managers. Those are marked with ! in the table below.

This project started in GitHub repository ghdl/ghdl (which was named tgingold/ghdl back then). The main purpose was testing GHDL on multiple GNU/Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora), since Travis CI supported Ubuntu only and Docker. For each target platform, two images were used, one for building and another one for testing.

Later, most of the Docker related sources were split to repository ghdl/docker. There, some additional simulation tools were added, such as VUnit and GtkWave. Images including the ghdl-language-server were also added. When synthesis features were added to GHDL, and since it provides a plugin for Yosys, tools for providing a complete open source workflow were requested. Those were nextpnr, icestorm, prjtrellis, SymbiYosys, etc.

At some point, ghdl/docker had as much content related to non-GHDL tools, as resources related to the organisation. At the same time, SymbiFlow aimed at gathering open source projects for providing an integrated open source EDA solution. However, it did not have official container images and help was wanted. This repository was initially created for moving all the tools which were not part of GHDL, from ghdl/docker to symbiflow/containers. However, apart from adding known Verilog tools, the scope was widened. Hence, the repository was published in hdl/containers.