Altera Quartus II v7.0 under openSUSE 10.2

The Altera Quartus II 7.0 software is officially only supported under
Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3 and 4 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 9.

It also works under the newer openSUSE Linux 10.2, but there are
a few quirks:

  - Quartus hangs sometimes in a futex() system call when starting up.
    Aborting it with Ctrl-C and restarting it again is the only
    workaround I know so far.

  - Quartus depends on the "usbfs" file system being compiled into the
    kernel in order to operate the USB-Blaster cable. Unfortunately,
    usbfs is no longer compiled into the openSUSE 10.2 default kernel,
    which now uses the similar, but incompatible, "udev" driver instead
    (/dev/bus/usb instead of /proc/bus/usb). Therefore, to use the
    USB-Blaster cable, you need to recompile your kernel as described
    on

      https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=210899

    to include "usbfs". This is fairly trivial to do, but obviously
    requires root access. There are rumours that the next kernel update
    will reintroduce "usbfs". You also have to mount "usbfs"
    under /proc/bus/usb.

  - OpenSUSE 10.2 also no longer uses the "hotplug" system to start custom
    scripts when some device is plugged in, therefore the patch at

      http://www.altera.com/support/software/drivers/dri-usb_b-lnx.html

    is no longer applicable. A workaround is to do the necessary
    "chmod 666 /proc/bus/usb/.../..." yourself each time after plugging
    in the cable. (TODO: find out how to configure udevd to do the same)

I hope that Altera will

  - figure out the strange occasional futex() hang on startup

  - compile using a newer version of libusb that also understands
    how to use /dev/bus/usb instead of the now deprecaded /proc/bus/usb

  - update http://www.altera.com/support/software/drivers/dri-usb_b-lnx.html
    to explain what to do on newer distributions that replaced
    hotplug with udev (probably simply involves adding some file
    to /etc/udev/rules.d)

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain

Markus,

> - OpenSUSE 10.2 also no longer uses the "hotplug" system to start custom
> scripts when some device is plugged in, therefore the patch at
> 
> http://www.altera.com/support/software/drivers/dri-usb_b-lnx.html
> 
> is no longer applicable. A workaround is to do the necessary
> "chmod 666 /proc/bus/usb/.../..." yourself each time after plugging
> in the cable. (TODO: find out how to configure udevd to do the same)

I'm running Gentoo Linux and was having the same problem. Took me the better
part of the morning a few weeks ago to get eveything working well, but I
solved this one. Here's how:

1 - become root
2 - Go to /etc/udev/rules.d
3 - create a file named 32-altera.rules in there containing

=== Cut here ====
# udev rules file for Altera USB programming devices (udev >= 0.98)
#
ACTION!="add", GOTO="altera_rules_end"
SUBSYSTEM!="usb_endpoint", GOTO="altera_rules_end"

ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6001", MODE="0666"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6002", MODE="0666"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="09fb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6003", MODE="0666"

LABEL="altera_rules_end"
=== Cut here ====

4 - either restart udevd, or simply reboot

After that, an USB blastershould have the proper permissions once plugged
in.

Best regards,


Ben