Windows 10+

  • Minimum Requirements

    • Windows 10 version 2004 (Build 19041 and higher)

    • Quad-core CPU running at 2.0 GHz+

    • 8 GiB of RAM

  • Recommended

    • Windows 11

    • 6th Gen Intel® Core CPU or later OR AMD Ryzen™️ 1000-series or later

    • 16 GiB of RAM

Setting up WSL

  1. Follow official Microsoft documentation for WSL located here to install the WSL 2.

Note

OpenLane 2 requires WSL2. Make sure that you’re using Windows 11, or Windows 10 is up-to-date.

  1. If you have an installation of WSL2 from 2023 or earlier, follow Microsoft’s official documention to enable systemd

    • systemd is enabled by default for installations of WSL2 from mid-2023 or later.

  2. Click the Windows icon, type in “Windows PowerShell” and open it.

    The Windows 11 Start Menu with "powershell" typed into the search box, showing "Windows PowerShell" as the first match

  3. Install Ubuntu using the following command: wsl --install -d Ubuntu

  4. Check the version of WSL using following command: wsl --list --verbose

    It should produce the following output:

    PS C:\Users\user> wsl --list --verbose
    NAME                   STATE           VERSION
    * Ubuntu                 Running         2
    
  5. Launch “Ubuntu” from your Start Menu.

    The Windows 11 Start Menu showing a search for the "Ubuntu" app, next to which is a window of the Windows Terminal which opens after clicking it

Installing Nix

Warning

Do not install Nix using apt. The version of Nix offered by apt is more often than not severely out-of-date and may cause issues.

To install Nix, you first need to install curl:

$ sudo apt-get install -y curl

Then install Nix by running the following command:

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix/pr/1145 | sh -s -- install --no-confirm --extra-conf "
    extra-substituters = https://openlane.cachix.org
    extra-trusted-public-keys = openlane.cachix.org-1:qqdwh+QMNGmZAuyeQJTH9ErW57OWSvdtuwfBKdS254E=
"

Enter your password if prompted. This should take around 5 minutes.

Make sure to close the Ubuntu terminal after you’re done with this step and start it again.

If you already have Nix set up…

You will need to enable OpenLane’s Binary Cache manually.

If you don’t know what that means:

We use a service called Cachix, which allows the reproducible Nix builds to be stored on a cloud server so you do not have to build OpenLane’s dependencies from scratch on every computer, which will take a long time.

First, you want to install Cachix by running the following in your terminal:

$ nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -iA cachix

Then set up the OpenLane binary cache as follows:

$ sudo env PATH="$PATH" cachix use openlane

…and restart the Nix daemon.

$ sudo pkill nix-daemon

If you do know what this means, the values are as follows:

extra-substituters = https://openlane.cachix.org
extra-trusted-public-keys = openlane.cachix.org-1:qqdwh+QMNGmZAuyeQJTH9ErW57OWSvdtuwfBKdS254E=

Make sure to restart nix-daemon after updating /etc/nix/nix.conf.

$ sudo pkill nix-daemon

Cloning OpenLane

With git installed, just run the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/efabless/openlane2

That’s it. Whenever you want to use OpenLane, nix-shell in the repository root directory and you’ll have a full OpenLane environment. The first time might take around 10 minutes while binaries are pulled from the cache.

To quickly test your installation, simply run openlane --smoke-test in the nix shell.