nios2 flash programmer doesn't work

Altera_Forum · ‎10-12-2011

Ok, I've had enough now. My woes with the flash programmer in v11.0sp1 are multifold:

1) Battled with Qsys and tristate bridges to make the flash work at all (see earlier post).

2) Now that the CFI table can be read it says "Info: Input file is too large to fit (device size = 0x200000)", now the first address in the .flash file is 0x00000000 and the last is 0x00025680, so well within the limits. Even the flash file itself is 375kbytes, so less than the 2MB flash memory if it felt the need to program it in ascii rather than binary.

3) And just to p*ss me off whenever I invoke flash programmer from the IDE it asks me how I want it setup, via BSP or SOPC file, and which file I want to add. If I try "File->Save" once I've got all this setup it opens up a nice box pointing at the eclipse "bin" directory, I move back to the project directory, type in a filename and click "Save". The File does NOT appear in the directory. What happened to the list of projects I might want to program that Nios2-studio used to produce, with all the relevant settings saved? How can I add options into the nios2-flash-programmer command line? I always used to be able to in nios2-studio.

4) I dread to think what they've done to the debugger.... but won't be able to find that out until I've managed to program my device!

This version, and I've got SP1, just seems very premature.

Altera_Forum · ‎10-13-2011

I don't know if this will solve your problem, but I already experienced a similar issue. While the file was supposed to be small enough to fit to our flash memory.

The problem was while invoking elf2flash through our scripting environment. The --end option was set to a value lower than the physical final code location in flash, generating a .flash file that would not program afterward when using nios2-flash-programmer. If I recall, the error was similar to what you are experiencing.

Hope this will help a bit. At least, that's something to look at.

Good luck,

--M

Altera_Forum · ‎10-21-2011

I get the same problem. Mabye that's a bug.

Altera_Forum · ‎10-21-2011

I did find the answer, though can't explain it. I have my reset address at offset 0 in flash and my exception address at offset 0 in SRAM. In creating the .flash file it asked for the first byte in the SRAM to be programmed too. When I changed to offset 32 in SRAM for the exception address everything started working.

Altera_Forum · ‎01-18-2012

Did you ever get it to save the flash-settings file?

Altera_Forum · ‎01-18-2012

You can save the file over an existing file, but not to a new one.

So, create an empty file with the name you want to use and write over that one.

Same issue as creating symbol file of BDF files.

Altera_Forum · ‎10-03-2012

Thanks! Its 2012 and they still haven't fixed the file saving!