Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorIn fact, after upgrading to Quartus 9.1 SP1 our situation with training is ALOT better.
Hard IP when burned into on-board flash always trains to correct number of lanes. As documented in the IP release notes hard IP has other serious problems. For example, every attempt to disable our device from Windows device manager lead to a fatal PCIe bus error. Luckily, we didn't pick the devkit as a platform by ourselves but got it from the client so it's sort of his own fault. So he would have to live with this crap. Soft PCIe IP behaves better in that particular regard, but in order to burn it into flash one needs the license that we don't have. If either Altera reps or our client will give us the license for free (and I feel like it's their moral obligation after all the bull**** that we were forced to eat with broken 9.0 and 9.1 versions) we could try that configuration as well. Overall, I should say that PCIe on Stratix-IV GX devkit story is my worst ever experience with Altera. By far. Back to your last question - with Quartus 9.1 SP1 programming the flash via Board Update Portal finally works. 'sof2flash -pfl' is as fast as a drunk snail but it produces the working hex file. See the discussion on this very forum: http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20577
