[ryanmjacobs]

All FPGA synthesis runs for https://webfpga.com are on Arch Linux based containers. There isn't a lot of traffic. We get around 5-10 synthesis runs per day from .edu accounts. It's been reliable, lightweight, and stable.

When developing the platform, we tried Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS, and at the time (about 1.5 years ago), Arch Linux was the most reliable OS for getting the 32-bit deps to work with existing commercial chains, and new toolchain compiles (IceStorm, NextPnr, etc). I think this is because Arch typically includes the development headers by default.

As long as the regression tests continue to pass, we will likely continue to roll with Arch Linux. We only tend to rebuild images once a month or so, since our backend is fairly feature complete already.

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I think the trick is:

* Use containers, e.g. dockerhub's archlinux

* Assume that you will never be able to run pacman on a live system. Instead, rebuild a new image with a Dockerfile with your new packages -- then deploy that.