BeMicro and Programming Under Linux

Yes, I saw this post.

It is quite disappointing that Altera doesn't make the USB programming interface easier. The parallel port based blaster was quite trivial and easy to implement. Perhaps if they used the generic usb-serial protocol, then they wouldn't have to rely on specialized drivers. They may sell more silicon that way.

One of the things I like best about Altera is the Linux support. I had toyed with Actel parts when I was making a decision early on, because programming the silicon was easier with the built-in flash-ram. But two things were disappointing about Actel. First, the parts were significantly slower, and second, the Linux support was pathetic.

Way back in time, more than 15 years, I used Xilinx parts, but then a year into my project, they made marketing survey based decisions to drop Linux support and discontinue some of their best parts, so I switched to QuickLogic which were better parts overall, but were only programmable once without the window.

At this point, I have eliminated all of my Windows computers and dual boot machines, since Linux has become so well supported. Thus, I cannot test the BeMicro on a Windows machine. I see the BeMicro 'non-support' of Linux as a regression, and hopefully, not a trend.

As a side note, I find it both hilarious and comforting that the Windows based Quartus is built on top of Cygwin, which is really Linux running in emulation within Windows. They should be able to support native Linux better.

Wouldn't it be even more hilarious if I was forced to resort to running Quartus under 'wine' to try to get this BeMicro driver to work.

I have also designed my own bit-banging programming tools for both JTAG and AS which were equally trivial to the parallel interface. I use them in various scenarios including remote update for a fully wireless and inductively powered device. But alas, as the other poster stated, not compatible with the Quartus programmer due to its special hardware. With the information from the various BeMicro posts, it should be relatively easy to write my own programming tool, and then simply produce a binary output programming file from Quartus.

With the BeMicro, I still haven't gotten to the NIOS IDE stage, so I suspect there may be additional surprises with the non-Linux supported USB interface.