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

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.

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.