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difference between quartus .pof programming vs nios ii flash prog

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
‎05-23-2014 06:26 PM
2,021 Views

I'm trying to configure my Altera Cyclone III development board from Altera to configure the FPGA out of flash upon power up. Then end goal is to put BOTH my hardware design and nios ii software design in CFI flash so the system can power up and run my nios ii c-code automatically. I have the fpga configuring itself upon power up when I use quarts to program the .pof file into the CFI flash. This works really well. The problem is when I use the nios ii eclips flash programmer to program the fpga design it doesn't load the hardware design correctly like it does with the .pof file. I use the GUI and then command line (neither seem to be working) to convert the .sof file to a flash file and I then program the flash file into the flash chip. The program doesn't error out, it successfully programs all the data, but upon power up it doesn't load the design. Since it works with the .pof file in quartus, but DOES NOT work with the nios ii flash programmer I'm wondering what the difference between the two is.  

 

I tried configuring the flash programmer from both the sopc and bsp. I also have tried checking all of these as well as unchecking all of these options in BSP Editor -> Settings -> Advanced -> hal -> linker. These are the allow_code_at_reset, enable_alt_load, enable_alt_load_copy_exceptions, enable_alt_load_copy_rodata, enable_alt_load_copy_rwdata options. In reading these I feel like they should be on, but I've read in the documentation they should be off and on the forums there are mixed opinions in posts.  

 

My goal is to program the hardware and software design into flash and upon power configure the fpga hardware design, load the boot loader, copy the software design and run out of the ram in the fpga. I can bootload the software design no problem if i program the fpga with the .sof file from quartus I just can't get the hardware design to load from flash using the nios flash programmer. Any input is greatly appreciated as I'm pretty stuck on this. 

 

ps. I'm using this: 

 

http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/nios2/edh_ed51002.pdf 

 

2-53 as a go by. Boot from flash and run from volatile memory.
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