I had a project which I wanted to run from flash and I have managed to come up with the following procedure.
- Start Quartus and then Qsys. From Qsys menu start the NIOS II Shell. If you do it from the Windows start menu it will not work as there is a bug in version 13.1, which results in the process finishing without an indication that it did not actually work.
- In the shell go to the location where the flash files are.
- Execute the following command: nios2-flash-programmer --debug --base=0x02011000 --epcs hw.flash
- The command above will program the flash with the NIOS system and will also give you the exact address of the flash controller, note this down. Power cycle the board and try to stick some code on it to verify that the NIOS is starting up okay.
- Execute the following command to flash the application software. nios2-flash-programmer --epcs --debug --base=<base addr in hex that you wrote down> sw.flash
- Have fun.
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