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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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13 years ago

Nios II: The system console model is invalid.

Earlier today, I had a running NIOS-II design. Could write and develop code, everything was great. I swapped out a peripheral in QSYS, refreshed, regenerated the QSYS file, recompiled the FPGA, re-generated the BSP and built the software project from scratch.

No matter what I do now, I always get the dialog box that pops up with the following message:

"The system console model is invalid. Cannot launch."

It doesn't give me any other errors or make any complaints about the code.

I see a couple of other threads, including one saying to go to run configurations and check the boxes:

  • ignore sys id

  • ignore time stamp

Both of these seem unsafe to me (but they did allow my program to run). It's pretty clear that there's an inconsistency somewhere/. Am running Quartus 12.0

I've checked the address map and it looks OK. I've gone back to the last working design and compared a lot of files. No clues.

Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this?

2 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    13 years ago

    I often observed this behaviour in two situations:

    The first one happens when I first load a design, then I load a different one without closing the previous Nios console window. Although this seems not to be your case, all I need to do here is closing the old window.

    The second one is more subtle: it happens when I saved the previous design in a NV memory (epcs or whatever) for automatic boot upon power up. If you then load with jtag a newer design having the same base epcs address, the OLD Nios firmware would indeed boot from epcs and this could lead to the inconsistency error. The solution is making sure epcs is blank when you switch to a new design.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    13 years ago

    I found that closing, then restarting, Nios II 12.0 Software Build Tools for Eclipse, "fixes" the problem.