Running Quartus II on ReadHat Linux 9.0

Yes please.

Sesh67

Yes I am!

Thank you very much,

DAMC

OK: It seems there is some interest, give me a day or two and I will verify and post a step by step list. Under the same subject/thread. UL2K

October 18, 2003 The procedure is posted at:

If you experience any problem, (I may I missed something) post a message here.

October 18, 2003: just posted the procedure:

If I forgot something, please let me know. (Post here).

-----

Hi,

I currently trying to get Quartus running on Mandrake 9.2 and needless to say: it fails. Installation was no problem but I can't get it running. It just gives me the message "Abort" and that's it. Not even a core dump. I've ran quartus with GDB and then it gives a segmentation fault in libkernel32.so

Output from GDB: Starting program: /usr/local/quartus/linux/quartus (no debugging symbols found)...(no debugging symbols found)... (no debugging symbols found)...(no debugging symbols found)... (no debugging symbols found)...(no debugging symbols found)... (no debugging symbols found)...[New Thread 16384 (LWP 28457)] [New Thread 32769 (LWP 28496)] [New Thread 16386 (LWP 28497)] [New Thread 32771 (LWP 28498)] [New Thread 49156 (LWP 28499)] [New Thread 65541 (LWP 28500)] [New Thread 81926 (LWP 28501)]

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. [Switching to Thread 16384 (LWP 28457)]

0x41af5a05 in string_hash () from /usr/local/quartus/mw/lib-linux_optimized/libkernel32.so

I've also tried the old 'compatible' glibc library (compat-glibc-6.2-2.1.3.2.src.rpm) but that isn't working either.

Currently downloading the service pack but that will take a long time...

Anyone any idea's?

kind regards, Jan

l> October 18, 2003

Hi,

Right, solved it. I needed to hack a script because I got a error on an if expression. In qenv.csh (in $QUARTUS_ROOT/adm) I needed to change the following:

if (-f /etc/issue) then set redhat_ver=`cat /etc/issue | grep release | sed -e 's/Red Hat Linux release //g' -e 's/(.*//g'` if ($redhat_ver != "7.1") then ...

Here was the problem: redhar_ver got the value "Mandrake Linux release 9.1" and therefor there was this wrong if expression. I've removed the whole "if (-f /etc/issue)" then construct and replaced it by "setenv MWMM allwm".

And now it works... Maybe Altera should write a cleaner script that first checks if it's a Red Hat distribution...

kind regards, Jan

Jan De Ceuster wrote:

Yes. But it would have been even better if they checked for the

*features* they need rather than checking the distribution.

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?

Indeed and I even had to manualy add some directories to the librarypath to get everything up and running. It just doesn't look profecional to me. 2 days work (at most) for a decent engineer and the scripts would have been perfect. I'm a bit dissapointed...

kind regards, Jan

The topic of where to pick up the Red Hat Release was pointed to by another user who tried Quartus 3.0 with a non Red Hat version of Linux. This has been fixed for Quartus II 4.0.

- Subroto Datta Altera Corp.

to get

work

I'm a

To everyone: I realize that this is not ideal, but the fact "it works" underline at least:

1) There is significant interest in FPGA tools on Linux : Possibly the most important!

2) This is really feasible and requires minimal work (at least for Red Hat). So we (users) may expect someone at Altera to be motivated, pickup the ball, and treat this seriously. Altera has very talented engineers, and there is no doubt in my mind that very soon a nice install, possibly similar to the one of Open Office (GUI based) will be available for Linux.

3) Mandrake: I have also tried Mandrake 9.1 and did not get anywhere! This is a pity, because Mandrake is most-likely the most user-friendly Linux distribution: usually very easy to install.

4) Suse 9.0: did anyone try?

Conclusion: Note that OpenOffice runs pretty much on any Linux distro. This is done at the (reasonable) cost of a fatter distribution, statically linked. Indeed some portion(s) of the code could be provided as source to allow easy run on most "current" Linux distros.

Well, I guess this will now have a life of its own. Enjoy. Andre G.

I've been a Linux user since 1993 and I'm very happy to see that Linux support from the major FPGA vendors is improving.

However, I would like Altera and Xilinx to spend their efforts on other things than a GUI based install program. I recall all the problems I have had over the years with the Xilinx GUI based install program under Solaris. It would sit there for days flashing cute ads without installing anything :-( A simple tar would done the job. Of course you most likely need a way of specifying which devices and parts to install, but that's about it. Sometimes I install Linux software on file servers which don't even have X11.

I would rather have better scripting capabilities, support for distributed processing (e.g. synthesis and place and route using a cluster to improve throughput), device programming support under Linux, Opteron 64-bit support, etc.

I have tried on a SuSe 8 AMD64 system. Quartus II 3.0SP1 bails out with the message:

Unknown Linux processor MWARCH: Undefined variable.

But I think it should be possible to get it to run by hacking the scripts so that it will find its dynamic libraries, etc.

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?

I prefer to have my scripts under a source control system to be able to generate reproducible results. Not a designs which accidentally did or did not work because somebody on the project checked off an option several levels down in a GUI dialog box(1) (if DUI is "driving under influence", what is GUI?). For floorplanners and waveform viewers I use GUI's, but for plain synthesis, place and route, etc. I prefer scripts.

I would like to say that Altera have spend quite a bit of effort putting scripting capabilities into Quartus. Quartus have TCL support, but the way you write your "code" is kind of weird:

project add_assignment $top "" "" $clk GLOBAL_SIGNAL ON

In order to check that the command had succeeded you have to check if the above command returned something like "assignment made". It also seems that the names and values for the various assignments might change from different Quartus releases.

In later versions of Quartus Altera has added several smaller tools which do synthesis and elaboration, place and route, timing analysis, etc. This is good, even though I can't really see why bash is more suited than TCL to run the various commands/tools (assuming you make tclsh do dynamic linking).

However, these tools seem to use a CSF (compiler settings file) to specify the various options to the different tools. This is a plain text file. What I don't like about this approach is that you loose the scripting ability. Of course you can write your own programs to generate these files. What I fear is that their format might change in future releases (please prove me wrong on this).

What I would like is a *standard documented API* for the scripts. For the project assignment mentioned above I would like to have a command called something like "set_global_clock_signal $clk". If this command returned 0 (or some other predefined value) it has succeeded. Otherwise, I could a verbose error message by calling some other command (e.g. with the command name and result code as arguments).

It would have been even better if the vendor would proved different scripting interfaces like TCL, Guile, Scheme, Perl, etc. to their tools so the users could pick their favorite scripting language. If the vendor provided the C API then users or others could generate a shell (they could provide TCL as a minimum or example) for their favorite language.

Just my 2¢.

Petter

1) CSF (compiler settings files) would of course solve this issue.

--
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?

Based on feedback from our UNIX (Solaris, Linux and HP) users, we have intentionally made our UNIX installs simple and script based. UNIX environments can be diverse and a script based approach allows power users to step in and fix things as needed to let them do their job, rather than wait on factory support for trivial items. A script based approach has also proven to be very robust and has virtually eliminated all support calls for installation issues.

Also based on feedback from our UNIX users we have invested substantial resources in improving our command line interfaces and procedural (Tcl based) scripting capabilities in Quartus II 3.0 and in the upcoming releases. More on this in a future post. As usual we welcome your feedback and in helping make Quartus a better product for you.

- Subroto Datta Altera Corp.

Petter,

Your 2 cents and several more from our customers big and small, have added up to a full dollar. Take a look at AN 312:

which is fully supported in Quartus II 3.0. This is the new Tcl API which Altera will support, document and add to going forward. It addresses the issues you have mentioned below. The old API will also be supported for backwards compatibility, but it is recommended that new projects use the new Tcl API exclusively.

We have added more functions than the ones listed in App Note 312 for the next version of Quartus. Some of these are: project_new project_open is_project_open project_close project_exists project_archive project_restore set_project_settings get_project_settings project_settings_exist set_parameter get_parameter get_all_parameters set_global_assignment get_global_assignment get_all_global_assignments set_instance_assignment get_instance_assignment get_all_instance_assignments set_location_assignment get_location_assignment export_assignments create_base_clock create_relative_clock foreach_in_collection set_multicycle_assignment set_timing_cut_assignment

and the parameters to these functions have a -keyword syntax. They are not position dependent anymore. To make it easy for new users to learn this API, the entire Quartus Project can be written out as a Tcl script (of course from the GUI :-), archived and used to recreate the project from scratch each time.

Regards,

Subroto Datta

- Altera Corp.

Thank you for the link. I've read some previous documentation on Quartus scripting, but I have not seen this one yet.

It looks like Altera is going in the right direction.

Great. Are all the assignment keywords documented anywhere?

If not in some cases it would have been easier to have a command wrapper around the setting. I used the APP note as a guide to write an improved quartus_sh script. I'm adding files using:

foreach f $flist { set_global_assignment -name VERILOG_FILE $f }

My problem is that most of the files will include another. So I get an error saying that it can't find the include file. I had no idea what the assignment name for this command was. If it was a command I could have done "info commands" and search through the output and guess which one did the job and run it with a -help argument to learn about its parameters etc.

The way I figured out was to launch the GUI and generate a TCL script to learn that the -name option I was looking for was USER_LIBRARIES...

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?

Followup to: By author: Petter Gustad In newsgroup: comp.arch.fpga

Indeed. Most Linux users would vastly prefer one or more RPMs which "just work" once installed. Interactive install is not a good thing.

-hpa

--
 at work,  in private!
If you send me mail in HTML format I will assume it's spam.
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
Architectures needed: ia64 m68k mips64 ppc ppc64 s390 s390x sh v850 x86-64

Hi Andre,

I did try Suse 8.1, 8.2 and 9.0, and in allcases it failed at an unexpected point. GUI came up nicely and stuff, and for MAX devices you'll get some wonderful results, but for SRAM-based devices, something is going wrong. Someone within development is looking at this though, and I have his phone number...

Best regards,

Ben

to get

work

I'm a

Never needed to do this - and I'm running Gentoo Linux, an utterly unsupported (but rather good) distribution. It just runs out of the box. I've been working on Altera's system identification scripts in the past.

Trouble with all this distribution stuff is that there is no defined standard that tells you how to determine which distribution a system is running on. Even doing an "ls -l /etc | grep *release" will not give you the full info, because every distro puts different things into these files, plus they may have, for example redhat-release and lsb-release, containing different data structures. Determining the kernel version and/or glibc version is useless (Suse 9.0 reports 2.4.21-99 or so), glibc versions may or may not have NTPL support using the same version number and more of that stuff. Really messy.

I think that if Altera could find a waterproof way of figuring out which distribution and version of it it's running on, plus its capability model, it would be worth a patent, even if they didn't apply for it ;-)

If you have any tips (including just mentioning which directories you still had to add), you're welcome to post them.

Best regards,

Ben