Many universities, like most users resist updating the operating systems of their Unix/Linux machines because of the time and labor involved. As the old adage goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" and as long as the course material, software and licenses do not change, this works fine.

In general, the semiconductor industry must constantly keep up to date with current operating systems. This is due to the fact that they continually refresh their hardware in order to get the highest performing systems, which come with current operating systems and security updates. As the EDA vendors struggle to keep up with the latest changes in hardware and operating systems that customers use, they often must drop support for older releases.

Universities refresh hardware much less frequently and remain longer on older versions of the software and operating systems than is typical in industry. This can sometimes cause compatibility issues with new licenses issued by the EDA vendors.

In order to avoid such problems, Universities should plan to update their operating systems to a more current version on a regular basis. Since most operating system vendors release a new version every two years, if you have not touched your systems in over three years, you should look at updating the operating system. Luckily, in the Enterprise Unix/Linux world, the operating system vendors typically do not charge for a particular version of the operating system. If you have a license to run their OS, you typically have the right to load the current version. Also, the operating system vendors have been diligent in maintaining hardware compatibility support for older hardware. So unless you have extremely old hardware, you should be able to load a current operating system to better enable you to keep up with the latest EDA software tool releases.