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

formatting link

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

formatting link

is no longer applicable.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

formatting link

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,

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