Building from Source

The build script produces identical output whether run locally or in CI — both use the same manylinux_2_34_x86_64 Docker image for reproducibility.

Prerequisites

  • Docker

  • bash / sh

  • Internet access (clones upstream repos and downloads dnf packages)

Local build

# Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/EDAPack/nextpnr-bin.git
cd nextpnr-bin

# Run inside manylinux container (sets CI_BUILD=1 to install system packages)
docker run --rm \
    --volume "$(pwd):/io" \
    --env CI_BUILD=1 \
    --workdir /io \
    quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_34_x86_64 \
    /io/scripts/build.sh

The tarball is written to release/nextpnr-bin-manylinux-x64-<version>.tar.gz.

Build phases

scripts/build.sh runs the following phases in order:

  1. System packages (CI_BUILD=1 only) — dnf install of cmake, Boost, Eigen3, bzip2, zstd, gcc-c++, etc.

  2. Python packages — pip install intervaltree apycula (needed by nextpnr CMake configure for Gowin chipdb generation)

  3. Clone nextpnr — latest tag from YosysHQ/nextpnr

  4. IceStorm — clone & build YosysHQ/icestorm (ICEPROG=0)

  5. Trellis — clone & build YosysHQ/prjtrellis (out-of-tree, INSTALL_LIBDIR=lib)

  6. Mistral — clone Ravenslofty/mistral branch nextpnr-latest (source-only; built inline by nextpnr CMake)

  7. Peppercorn — clone YosysHQ/prjpeppercorn (device files only)

  8. nextpnr CMake + build — all backends enabled, STATIC_BUILD=OFF, Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS=ON, -static-libstdc++ -static-libgcc

  9. Strip — strip --strip-unneeded on all binaries

  10. ldd check — warns if any unexpected shared libraries are linked

  11. Package — tar.gz created in release/

Key CMake flags

Flag

Purpose

-DSTATIC_BUILD=OFF

Avoids global -static flag that breaks Mistral’s CMake sub-project

-DBoost_USE_STATIC_LIBS=ON

Links Boost .a files instead of .so

-DBUILD_PYTHON=OFF

No Python embedding → no libpython runtime dep

-DBUILD_GUI=OFF

No Qt dependency

-DHIMBAECHEL_SPLIT=ON

Builds separate nextpnr-himbaechel-<arch> binaries

-DUSE_IPO=OFF

Avoids link-time optimisation issues in the container

Cleaning build artifacts

Build artifacts are created inside Docker as root. To remove them:

docker run --rm \
    --volume "$(pwd):/io" \
    quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_34_x86_64 \
    sh -c "rm -rf /io/icestorm /io/prjtrellis /io/nextpnr /io/mistral \
           /io/prjpeppercorn /io/deps-install /io/nextpnr-build /io/release"