Altera Quartus II on Debian GNU/Linux

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:09:17 +0200, Anssi Saari wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
>> I think Xilinx has already made the transition for most of their tools,
>> the only things that will never be fixed are the legacy tools like
>> fpga_editor.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, since you mentioned you run Xilinx tools in
> Fedora. Have you tried the 64-bit fpga_editor from ISE 11.1.04? I just
> get a segmentation fault.

I run that in a CentOS 5 VM. I almost never use the GUI for Xilinx tools, 
I do everything with scripts. I have brought up the ISE GUI just to check 
which parts are supported and it does work in Fedora. I don't have 
scripts for the Altera tools so I run Quartus from it's GUI which crashes 
on Fedora but does work on 64 bit CentOS5. The Quartus 9.1 GUI is very 
buggy, at least it is the way I run it which is to ssh into a CentOS5.4 
VM. You have to be extremely delicate when you select a file to open from 
Quartus, dragging the mouse over a file name will cause a modal box to 
appear which hangs the interface about 50% of the time. The only solution 
is to kill Quartus using the dead app widget or from the command line and 
then restart it. The close box on Quartus is useless when it gets into 
this state because it's hung in some mode box. The SignalTap application 
and Timequest work fine, it's just the basic GUI which is broken. BTW 
I've found that I can't run SignalTap reliably from a native CentOS5.4 
machine, the Linux driver for the download cable is crap. The Linux 
driver for Chipscope is also a pain, it would be nice if Altera and 
Xilinx would provide proper GPLed drivers for their download cable so 
that they could be built into the kernel. Running SignalTap and ChipScope 
are the only things that I use Windows for. I put XP on an old single 
core machine which I access from rdesktop from my Linux machines.

whygee wrote:
> General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>> It's  a beta. The feature list looks like it's missing a ton of 
>> features which they are promising in the future. I think the issue is 
>> that they are transitioning from a proprietary closed source GUI 
>> toolkit to a proper open source toolkit. 
> 
> I heard (?) that Xilinx (or Actel ?) has the same troubles
> with Windows-based software, and they are forced to use
> proprietary Win-To-Lin solutions that make portability
> and/or efficiency difficult... I'll have to dig
> further in this subject.
> 

I don't remember the details, but I believe that both Altera and Xilinx 
used the same windows-to-linux library originally for their Linux ports, 
and that that particular library was royalty based.  Being royalty 
based, it is very difficult to make it available freely.  I guess they 
had good reason for picking that library at the time, but it has always 
seemed strange to me that the software should be build so strongly on 
*nix style solutions (lots of perl and tcl, amongst other things) and 
yet be so difficult to move to Linux.

David Brown <david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com> writes:

> I don't remember the details, but I believe that both Altera and
> Xilinx used the same windows-to-linux library originally for their

I think Xilinx used WindU and Altera used (and still use) Mainwin
originally, at least when I used the tools on SunOS/Solaris.

Petter
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General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:

> on Fedora but does work on 64 bit CentOS5. The Quartus 9.1 GUI is very 
> buggy, at least it is the way I run it which is to ssh into a CentOS5.4 
> VM. You have to be extremely delicate when you select a file to open from 
> Quartus, dragging the mouse over a file name will cause a modal box to 
> appear which hangs the interface about 50% of the time. The only solution 

I do all my builds using scripts, but sometimes I use the GUI to run
signaltap, the pin editor, chip planner, timing analyzer, megawizard,
and sopc builder. I've never experienced problems like you describe. I
don't get any modal boxes appearing whenever I move the mouse over
filenames in the open dialog box. I'm using Quartus 9.0 and 9.1 under
Gentoo with the sawfish window manager. I'm running most of my builds
on a remote machine over X11, but some builds are done locally
depending upon the load on the machines.

> I've found that I can't run SignalTap reliably from a native CentOS5.4 
> machine, the Linux driver for the download cable is crap. The Linux 

I've had minor problems with SignalTap under Linux in the past
(Quartus 7/8 or earlier if memory serves me right). But since 9.x I
haven't seen any problems and I use SignalTap, gdb, quartus_pgm, and
nios2-download, both locally and remotely using the Altera JTAG
server. However, I tend to instantiate megawizard generated signaltap
components rather than building them in the GUI.

> driver for Chipscope is also a pain, it would be nice if Altera and 
> Xilinx would provide proper GPLed drivers for their download cable so 

Or at least document the API, so I could make a signaltap and
chipscope interface for my ethernet based programmer.


Petter
-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:06:51 +0100, Petter Gustad wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
>> on Fedora but does work on 64 bit CentOS5. The Quartus 9.1 GUI is very
>> buggy, at least it is the way I run it which is to ssh into a CentOS5.4
>> VM. You have to be extremely delicate when you select a file to open
>> from Quartus, dragging the mouse over a file name will cause a modal
>> box to appear which hangs the interface about 50% of the time. The only
>> solution
> 
> I do all my builds using scripts, but sometimes I use the GUI to run
> signaltap, the pin editor, chip planner, timing analyzer, megawizard,
> and sopc builder. I've never experienced problems like you describe. I
> don't get any modal boxes appearing whenever I move the mouse over
> filenames in the open dialog box. I'm using Quartus 9.0 and 9.1 under
> Gentoo with the sawfish window manager. I'm running most of my builds on
> a remote machine over X11, but some builds are done locally depending
> upon the load on the machines.

My set up is as follows. My workstation and my servers are all running 64 
bit Fedora 12, the workstation is running Gnome the servers run at Init 
3. I'm running Quartus 9.1 on a KVM 64 bit CentOS5.4. VM (Init 3) on my 
servers. I ssh into the VM and then execute Quartus from an Xemacs shell. 
Quartus is the only program that gives me any trouble.

David Brown wrote:
> I don't remember the details, but I believe that both Altera and Xilinx 
> used the same windows-to-linux library originally for their Linux ports, 
> and that that particular library was royalty based.  Being royalty 
> based, it is very difficult to make it available freely.
that is coherent with what I have heard from rep/sales people in tradeshows...

> I guess they 
> had good reason for picking that library at the time, but it has always 
> seemed strange to me that the software should be build so strongly on 
> *nix style solutions (lots of perl and tcl, amongst other things) and 
> yet be so difficult to move to Linux.
who knows why :-/

yg
-- 
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