PCIe PIO Beginner Questions

Dave,

First off I want to thank you for your quick, exceedingly helpful responses, as well as your words of encouragement. I've been working on this trying to avoid asking another question (and skiing lake tahoe) but I think I have one last round of questions I still need to come through.

First off, about that thread you link in the beginning. The autocode generation did not work for me (12.1) but more importantly the step by step has not compiled either. The error its throwing is "pcie_pipe_ext_gxb_powerdown does not exist in macrofunction 'u5'(dbl clicking this reveals it is having problems with the top level .sv file)." The same error pops for ...pll_powerdown. I've been looking at this and it might be that my knowledge of system verilog is limited to the altera training, but I can't figure out what's up. the line ".pcie_pipe...powerdown (somevar)," definitely exists. If I look at the qsys_system.v file, pcie_pipe...powerdown is not assigned as an output. In fact the directions don't ask the powerdown signals on the pcie block to be exported. If you do export them it generates "pcie_powerdown_gxb_powerdown" and not what is in the .sv file. I tried renaming the .sv file to match the system.v file, tried deleting it all with and without exporting the powerdown group in qsys and I can't get the error to go away. Not sure where I've gone wrong, but I can't think of what else to try.

Second question is more about building understanding. So in your program there is the RAM, PCIe, and DMA block... so how does it ever know to do anything? Maybe it doesn't since you were just using it to test timing, in which case how do I get it to follow my directions? My current state of mind is that if I make a happy state machine as a .v, I can apparently turn that into a custom avalon mm block. Naive to what that entails, I could then hook it up in qsys to.. something. In your first post it sounds like I can hook it directly up to the PCIe block, but don't I have to go through the DMA guy? I thought the whole point of the DMA fella was to be able to interact with the PCIe block.

Thanks!

PS: thank you so much for correcting my impression of DMA. That was an "ooOOoo" moment over here