Vivado on Nixos in 2025

So you are here because the year is 2025 and there is no up to date instruction for running Xilinx Vivado on nixos (the last tutorial I could find is great and by kotatsuyaki). Since then, nix-ld has came out, Vivado is now a 90GB install instead of a 40GB install, and my computer is killing itself right now trying to install this software.

Binary

The AMD Xilinx Vivado software needs to be downloaded from AMD’s website here. There are two installers, the web based one and the tarball. AMD heavily recommends the web installer and says it saves space and install time compared to the tarball. I have not verified these claims, but I did successfully use the web installer. If you have exceptionally shit internet, it might be best to download the tarball.

[!Caution] You Need to make an AMD account to download the binary as well as enter your account to install the software.

Shell

Since nix-ld is now a thing, we can create a dev shell that sets it up and use that to install Xilinx. Please refer to nix-ld to configure it.

Once that is done, we can make a dev-shell which exports the required NIX_LD variables.

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{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }:
let
  inherit (pkgs) lib stdenv xorg;
in
pkgs.mkShell {
  NIX_LD_LIBRARY_PATH = lib.makeLibraryPath [
    pkgs.atk
    pkgs.cairo
    pkgs.dbus
    pkgs.fontconfig
    pkgs.freetype
    pkgs.gcc
    pkgs.gdk-pixbuf
    pkgs.glib
    pkgs.gtk3
    pkgs.libGL
    pkgs.libxcrypt
    pkgs.libxcrypt-legacy
    pkgs.libxkbcommon
    pkgs.ncurses5
    pkgs.nettools
    pkgs.pango
    pkgs.zlib
    stdenv.cc.cc
    xorg.libX11
    xorg.libXcomposite
    xorg.libXext
    xorg.libXfixes
    xorg.libXi
    xorg.libXrender
    xorg.libXtst
    xorg.libxcb
    xorg.xcbutilimage
    xorg.xcbutilkeysyms
  ];
  NIX_LD = builtins.readFile "${stdenv.cc}/nix-support/dynamic-linker";
  shellHook = ''
  /opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.2/bin/vivado
  '';
}

Installation

Once you have the shell created, enter it and then run the binary that was downloaded. I recommend installing Xilinx to /opt/Xilinx as that is the general path that non-native software should be stored on Linux.

After agreeing to the terms it should install and take a looooooooong time to do this.

Another thing I did that was nice is editing the desktop file for vivado to point towards the shell.nix that was created, allowing execution of vivado from the application launcher. Presuming the nix-shell is in /opt/Xilinx, this desktop file should work.

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[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=Vivado 2024.2
Comment=Vivado 2024.2
Categories=vivado;
Icon=/opt/Xilinx/Vivado/2024.2/doc/images/vivado_logo.png
Exec=nix-shell /opt/Xilinx/shell.nix

Is this the best way of doing this? I’d say probably not. It does work though, which is good enough for me.