Real Time OS support for NIOS-II

[Altera_Forum]

I am planning to create NoC on the cyclone-II development board. I am planning to generate the matrix topology for 64 processing elements. Kindly clarify whether follwoing supoort is there on Quartus and NIOS IDE. 

 1. Whether Quartus support more then one NIOS? If yes how many? 2. Whether Real time OS support for ecos is there for multiprocessor (64 nos). 3. Whether they support more then one DM9000 circuit interface.  Kindly clarify. Rajendra Gad

[Altera_Forum]

You can put as many NIOS CPUs as you want, as long as you have enough logic cells in the FPGA to support it. 

AFAIK there isn't any operating system that supports multiple CPUs today on the Nios II platform. I'm pretty sure that eCos doesn't, and even for Lunix I think that the Nios lacks some features to do SMP properly. The eCos operating system supports several network interfaces (2 by default I think, but you can patch it to support more) but you need to check the driver. Some drivers are very badly written and use glabal variables instead of the structures provided by the operating system, and this means they won't work well with multiple interfaces.

[Altera_Forum]

Agreed. The altera website says that multiprocessor support is offered by the "ERIKA" Operating system. Can u eleborate on above.

[Altera_Forum]

yup need more elaboration

[Altera_Forum]

Here is the link from ALTERA which says ERIKA supports multiprocessor environmnet.  

 http://www.altera.com/products/ip/processors/nios2/tools/embed-partners/evidence/emb-evidence.html  Regards Rajendra