Why doesn’t my Quartus/OpenCL license work on RedHat 7.x?

Description

The Quartus® Prime software  and Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ license requires the Ethernet port to be named eth0. RedHat /  CentOS 7.x has Ethernet port names such as enpXXXXX (i.e. enp20s63). Users may see following error while compiling:

For further information, refer to the FlexNet Licensing documentation, available at "www.flexerasoftware.com".

Could not acquire a valid license for the Intel(R) FPGA SDK for OpenCL(TM).

Error: Verilog generator FAILED.

Resolution

To work around this issue, follow the steps below and reboot the system. (Note that you will need sudo access on the host to run some commands)

•      vi /etc/default/grub

(add "net.ifnames=0" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable)

•      sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

•      sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="08:00:27:a9:7a:e1", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

Alternatively,  a dummy Ethernet port can be created by following the steps below: 

1. sudo modprobe dummy
2. sudo ip li add dummy0 type dummy
3. sudo ip link set name eth0 dev dummy0
4. sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether <NIC ID>  up

For example:  sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether EC:8E:B5:8F:F0:DD  up

This problem is scheduled to be fixed is a future version of the Quartus Prime software and Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL.