Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorI don't know about briefly.
The concept of a "Syslib" is being deprecated. The "BSP" grew out of the NIOS II Software Build Tools which became available I believe with the advent of 7.1 or 7.2. You really should read the following documents: http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/nios2/n2sw_nii52015.pdf http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/nios2/n2sw_nii52017.pdf http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/nios2/n2sw_nii52014.pdf The biggest difference between 9.1 and previous versions of the IDE is the way things are built. Until 9.1, Altera made use of the Eclipse CDT plugin for compiling projects. Basically Eclipse was doing the compilation and managing things more closely. Using the software build tools and the new 9.1 IDE, Eclipse becomes more just an interface for developing code and perhaps controlling some basic project settings. The IDE puts everything into a regular makefile. The build process is performed by simply calling make for the project and make handles the build rather than eclipse. The results of the build of course are made visible in eclipse. While there are likely several reasons why Altera moved this direction I think the largest factor was a desire to provide more flexibility and control to the users and how there software gets created. Things that are better: -The system library properties GUI has been replaced by the "BSP Editor" The BSP editor gives you much more control and flexibility over your BSP than was available in the System Library. It is very easy to create your own custom hardware and software components. It's also easy to select different versions of software packages or hardware drivers if more than one are available. -Building a software project is significantly faster using the newer flow. It's probably around 10X faster to build using the new flow. This is just the effect of moving away from the Eclipse CDT to the make flow. Things that are not better: -Currently the nios2 flash programmer interface in 9.1 is a bit pathetic and hard to use. I'm really hoping they improve this soon. They definitely took a step backward on that one. -The connection between the IDE and the makefile is not 100% complete. You still run into things where you end up manually editing the makefile. This will probably improve over time. I personally like the new flow much much better and I've actually been using it since 8.0. Better or worse, the old IDE is being obsoleted so you'll have to switch sooner or later. Might as well do it now. Jake
