[gmail] Re: Altera Nios2 troubles

[Marc Leeman]

> worried about this solution: the problem seems the Altera attitude
> vs the uClinux community. Better: we can't understand if none is using
> uClinux on Nios2 because the Altera attitude or because none thinks
> that is a good solution and so the Altera is not supporting it.  Now we
> have the impression that if we start a project we have to develop it
> (also the O.S.) without any help and for us is a big risk. Do you have
> had the same impression?

I've been working on Nios II about a year ago. The problem is that the
software to program the FPGAs on with Linux from Altera (Quartus) works
if you're lucky but might break with any new release and/or service
pack. If you don't plan on running 32-bit x86, you're in even more
problems.

Anyway, you can get this working under Linux.

The problem is, and this is my experience, that Altera basically does
not care about uCLinux as a kernel (they try to push OS/II, their
kernel); however they do use and provide the gcc sources.

With some patching and quite some cleanup; you should be able to get a
nice toolchain starting from that (and compile it yourself). I submitted
a patch to buildroot last year; and some ppl on niosforum picked it up
and improved it.

As for the embedded Linux kernel, that has been "outsourced" to
Microtronix. This company; as some embedded Linux vendors tend to do;
release their code in a tarball. Again you'll need to do some cleanup
and try to split off the changes in a number of functionality patches.

Obviously, there is no toolchain and development package available to
my knowledge for creating a decent rootfs that runs under Linux. Some
posts seem to indicate that they are available internally; but they have
not been released to the public.

Again, with some work; you'll be able to pull this off; and a number of
ppl have done this.

From a research point of view (and having worked at a university for
some years); I could appreciate this since there is really _a lot of
room_ for improvement :) There is no real reason why you should not get
everything working properly :) There are quite some ppl on niosforum.com
that are helpful.

On the other hand; from a commercial point of view; you might be a lot
better off adding a low cost PowerPC processor next to your FPGA which
has a lot better community support. The price you need for the hardware
solution and peripherals is likely to be compensated by the lower FPGA
cost and lower development time and better stability; esp. if you consider
that Nios2 has no MMU.

In my dealings with Altera about this; they have politely listened to my
concerns, have written them down and have probably burried them since I
haven't heard of them since (even though we did try to push the changes
and improvements out).

We now add a low cost PowerPC core on our designs and skip Nios II
completely for interfacing and control (in fact, IIRC, it is even
recommended by some ppl @Altera to go this way instead of the Nios II
solution).

-- 
  greetz, marc
God, I love science fiction.
	Crichton - Revenging Angel
scorpius.homelinux.org 2.6.17 #2 PREEMPT Thu Jun 22 07:18:33 CEST 2006 GNU/Linux
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