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I'm working on a project that requires the PCI bus. I currently have a PC with an Altera license (Quartus II, ver. 10.0) that I purchased in 2010. But now that I'm starting on this new PCI project I want to borrow an old Altera PCI Development Kit, Cyclone II Edition (2005 I think), from a colleague to play with before I start on the actual project. The first thing I want to try is sending some commands from my host SBC to the kit development board via PCI bus: read/write memory, light leds, etc.
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What operating system did you want to implement your PCI software?
Device driver development for PCI devices under Linux is pretty simple. For performing read/write access, its even simpler, as you do not even need to write a driver. In this PCIe thread, there is a zip file, and in that zip file is a program called pci_debug, it can be used for accessing any BAR on any PCI or PCIe device under Linux.
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So here's my question: In order to utilize this old kit's development board and the sample software and hardware image that come with it, do I need to install the software from this kit which comes with Quartus II 4.0 or can I simply port all his stuff to the Quartus II 10.0 (and NIOS II 10.0) that I already have installed (and licensed)? And if I have to install Quartus II 4.0 to use this kit, will installing Quartus II 4.0 have an adverse effect on the Quartus II 10.0 I already have installed?
Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
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I have multiple versions of Quartus installed, and they work fine together. I've also started installing older versions of Quartus inside a VirtualBox Virtual Machine. If you run the virtual machine inside a Windows XP or Linux host, the USB-Blaster can be given to the VM, so it works like a real development machine (for some reason this doesn't work under Windows 7).
The other thing I'll sometimes do is install the kit and then copy the installed folder to a USB drive, and then uninstall the kit. That way I can take a look at the example code. Generally however all I find useful is the schematic and the top-level design file. Once I have those, I create my own basic top-level file.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
