Running Vivado on Apple Silicon mac

As of early 2024, there’s no officially supported way to run Vivado on Apple Silicon mac. We have managed to run Vivado + Alchitry lab on Debian 12 + Rosetta, running on UTM (virtual machines for mac). This document shares how you can download the prepared image and run it using UTM.

System Requirement

Apple Silicon mac with least 8 GB of RAM and 280GB of free space for both downloading and unzipping (final free space needed: 160GB).

This method is tested on M2 Max Mac Studio and 15” M2 Macbook Air.

Installation Steps

Download UTM

You need to first download UTM. You can also use brew for this:

brew update 
brew install --cask utm

Download Image and Unzip

After that, download the image from here.

You need to be signed in to your SUTD account
This image comes with Debian 12, Rosetta, Vivado 2023.2 and Alchitry Labs 1.2.7 pre-installed

Then unzip the downloaded file, either using Finder or CLI:

unzip <source.zip> -d <destination_directory>

It is recommended that you download this to an external drive, and then unzip and store the unzipped .utm file to your computer. This process will take about 30-50 minutes because the size of the image is huge (approx 124 GB). You might want to move it out of your Downloads folder and put it somewhere more logical. This image will contain all your virtual machine’s data.

Start the VM

Once done, open UTM and import the image.

Check that there are TWO drives: sized approx 64 GB and 80 GB respectively in your .utm file. Right click on your .utm file and click Show package contents. You should see the following under Data/:

Login as `debian`

Start the VM and login with the password debian. Note that sudo password is also debian. You can start alchitry labs by opening terminal from the bottom menu of the desktop (press windows / command image if the dock isn’t visible) and type alchitry command. Then, use alchitry labs as usual:

Ensure that your desktop looks like this. If it doesn’t it means that what you have downloaded might be corrupted. Ensure you have enough space (280GB in total)!

Shared Directory

After compiling your code, you will need to load the binary to your FPGA. There’s no USB passthrough with the VM (it’s not the usual QEMU), so you will need to migrate PROJECT_PATH/work/alchitry.bin to your host machine and flash it to your FPGA using Alchitry Loader part of the Alchitry Labs.

You can share directories with your mac (host machine) by setting the desired shared directory in your host machine here. In this example we use Documents/alchitry-utm in our host machine as shared directory:

Then in Debian (your VM), you can access this directory via the path /media/share/DIRECTORY_NAME, in this case it will be /media/share/alchitry-utm.