How do you generate a makefile with the "Create Make Target" and "build make target" functions? Every time I try it I get: make -k dhrystone make: *** No rule to make target `dhrystone&#39; The reference guide is worthless in this area.

I must confess you have me confused, I haven&#39;t looked too hard but am quite familiar with the Nios II IDE and I could not find the "Create make target" and "build make target" options you refer to. I think by far the easiest route for you is to follow the software tutorial which can be found as follows Help->Welcome select Nios II IDE and then select the Software Development Tutorial. It should not take you long and you should then be able to build download and debug your application

I solved that problem by asking one of our software engineers whop has worked with linux before. The solution that the reference manual failed to cover is: You must create a file called "makefile". Then place the following into it: include Rules.mak dhrystone: dhrystone.exe dhry21a.o: dhry21a.c dhry21b.o: dhry21b.c timers_b.o: timers_b.c dhrystone.bin: dhry21a.o dhry21b.o timers_b.o $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) -o $@ $^ $(LDLIBS) dhrystone.elf : dhrystone.bin $(LD) -T $(LINKSCRIPT) -Ur -o $@ $< As i said, whomever wrote the reference guide is incompetent. I would have never figured this out on my own. who ever wrote it needs to rewrite it from the perspective of the user has never seen linux before and every step needs to be spelled out in intricate detail. As it sits now, it looks like Xilinx microblaze is going to win the project. Their stuff worked the first time out of the box, Altera hasn&#39;t. This isn&#39;t suprising, in my 12 years of hardware design Altera has always been difficult to work with. Xilinx usually works the first time. BTW, the &#39;create make target&#39; and &#39;build make target&#39; can be found by right clicking on the application project name and looking down to the bottom of the drop down menu that appears. My latest problem is the reference guide instructions for using the compact flash don&#39;t work. Specifically the linux configurator DOES NOT have anything called "e2fs support" anywhere. Additionally when I add IDE support I get an error stating &#39;na_ ide_..." is undefined. (or words to that effect). Since the manual states this is needed to use the flash card, obviously the writer of the manual dropped the ball again. See page 31 of the Ref guide. I&#39;m using the "full featured" version of the processor on Altera&#39;s Stratix demo board. Thanks and sorry for the ranting, John K.

John, Can you elaborate on a few points to assist in improving the docs? Specifically -- 1. Which document(s) are you referring to? 2. Which exact set of tools are you using? I see you mention Linux several times -- does this mean uClinux from our partner Microtronix? (Sorry if I am getting things confused -- soon our tools will all support running on Linux, as in developing on one&#39;s PC running Linux, and that adds the need to be more specific for us). 3. By IDE support do you mean the "Nios II IDE" (where you compile/debug) or IDE interface, as in compact flash/hard drive support? I am guessing from your last question you&#39;re trying to get an IDE interface working with uClinux, but I just want to be sure. Please realize that there is a line to be drawn where our Altera-specific tools (which I agree must be well-documented if we are to succeed) overlap onto other tools used by the industry. For example &#39;make&#39; - there are entire books (and websites) written on &#39;make&#39; and providing examples. If you&#39;d like I&#39;d be happy to locate some websites and/or literature references and post them here. If there are specific areas of our docs that you find lacking please post the title and page# s and we&#39;ll take an honest look. As far as Microblaze -- if you have better luck with it then I suggest you use the product that makes most sense in terms of economics, robustness, and ease of use. Its been our experience that we outperform our competitors (in the admittedly fledgling FPGA-based-processor league) in terms of quality substantially, but if your experience differs we sincerely appreciate feedback telling us where we can improve ourselves. Please note that I work for Altera so if your problems are on the uClinux side I can&#39;t help too much, but I can alert the relevant people of your problems; they frequent this forum too and assist on the linux-related forums.. on the other hand if your issues are with Altera docs I can have those issues looked at here.

John, Please note that I don&#39;t work for Altera or Microtronix, so I&#39;ll be direct: > The solution that the reference manual failed to cover is: > > You must create a file called "makefile". Then place the following into it: > > include Rules.mak From page 16, Nios II Linux Reference Guide: <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div> --- Quote Start --- creating a makefile Every Nios II Linux Application project should have a top-level Makefile. Each Makefile should include the Rules.mak file in order to take advantage of the automatic rules that are provided for building the Nios II Linux executable files. While it is not necessary to use the Rules.mak file, it is definitely recommended.[/b] --- Quote End --- > Specifically the linux configurator DOES NOT have anything called "e2fs support" anywhere. From page 31, Nios II Linux Reference Guide: <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div> --- Quote Start --- creating an extended 2 filesystem on a compactflash card This section will guide you through the process of creating an Extended 2 Filesystem (ext2fs) on a CompactFlash card that can be mounted in read-write mode.[/b] --- Quote End --- Correct. The specific bullet you are apparently referring to is a typo ... it should be "ext2fs". And support for ext2fs is ... the first option under the "File systems" menu: "Second extended fs support". > Additionally when I add IDE support I get an error stating &#39;na_ ide_..." is undefined. (or words > to that effect). From page 10, Nios II Linux Reference Guide: <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div> --- Quote Start --- The current default kernel configuration is meant for use with the example linux target hardware cores found in â€¦altera/kits/nios2/examples/verilog/<board>/linux. failure to do so will cause errors during the compile process when symbols cannot be found. A typical example would be enabling IDE support when there is no Compact Flash support in the target hardware.[/b] --- Quote End --- > the writer of the manual dropped the ball again Indeed. > Thanks and sorry for the ranting Perhaps just a bad hair day ;-) Regards, --Scott

I&#39;m using Nios 2 v1.0 with the Microtronix uClinux kernel on the Altera Stratix board. Actually this all started when I agreed to evaluate the Nios 2 processor and compare my results to a Xilinx Chip running uClinux also. The idea was to run a dhrystone test with the same OS on each. The results should be obvious which one was faster. Also device utilization and Megacore vs Coregen IP costs are relevant as well as price. The first problem occured when the software form Altera wouldn&#39;t allow uClinux to install. Research on the forum revealed I needed to obtain Nios 2 V1.0, install, then install uCLinux and then install the svc pack to upgrade to Nois 2 v1.01. Since I didn&#39;t have a copy of v1.0 I was stuck for several days. This was due to a support engineer at Altera telling me the eval version on the forum wouldn&#39;t work. Well after several days of waiting for Nios 1.0 to arrive from Altera and reading the posts on the forum, I realized the engineer didn&#39;t know what he was talking about. The version here will work. So I did the installation at my house first. I then attempted to compile and load the kernel & file system. I immediately started receiving the error "inttypes.h : no such file or directory". This was being called by line 3 in gen_crc32table.c When running the configure kernel program the option CRC32 functions was disabled. So I was unable to select Y or N. The only option was &#39;---&#39;. This was accomplished by following the directions as stated in the quick start guide. I tried for several evenings to fix this problem. Finally I deleted Nios from my machine and made sure all directories related to it were deleted. I then reinstalled and that problem seemed to go away. This was after other attempts to solve the problem. Next when I followed the quick start guide again and created the file system ( which went smoothly) I discovered the upload process didn&#39;t work. I still haven&#39;t figured that one out. I&#39;ve since taken the board back to work and it compiles and downloads properly. i don&#39;t understand why, I&#39;m using Win 2000 on both machines, and have the same environment variables. Now for the latest issue. My idea is to set up the compact flash card as a drive and download applications to it using FTP. This way I can download and run the dhrystone program. I&#39;m still working on this as I&#39;ve posted above. Maybe some of this should be as an appendix or here on the forum. Either would work. It would have saved me days of research if it had. Maybe a mini FAQ could be started with things like commands used in the SOPC builder, linux commands and their arguments, what scripts are being called and when... Page 18 of the Linux manual needs to be revamped completely. Expound a little more on how these are set up. It is a critical issue. I ultimately cut and pasted out of rules.mak into makefile to compile the .c code from the dhrystone directory. That took several hours of trial and error. Of course I don&#39;t know what all the parameters mean, an explanation of the more common ones would definitely help. A better example to use would be to describe how to compile the c code instead of just linking the object files. Some of the examples don&#39;t have .o files. I think adding these details will shorten the learning curve for the next beginner with linux. If you know of web sites that have info on operation of linux/unix and other details,please post them. Centralizing the details would help a lot. I really want to get this project working. Whatever processor has the best performance/price ratio is what we&#39;ll go with. However as I said, the xilinx test was completed in 3-4 evenings. John K.

How to build applications | Altera Community

14 Replies

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
21 years ago
Well that explains the error I was getting at home.

Now when I insert the flash card the console displays:
hda: 3SYSTEM SSSCF016MAA. CFA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x80920900-0x80920907,0x80920938 on irq 5.

So it looks like the hardware is configured properly.

According to the reference guide (p31) I am supposed to enter the command "fdisk /dev/hda"

but I get the response "Unable to open /dev/hda".

Any ideas?

John K
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
21 years ago
I just got your msg, I'll be looking into it this morning.
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
21 years ago
Hi... I was able to duplicate your error by having the CF card removed while starting up fdisk. Which leaves me to believe that the CF device driver isn't properly reading your compact flash card. When the driver for the CF card detects a card in the slot, you should see something along the lines of:

hda: SanDisk SDCFB-16, CFA DISK drive
Using anticipatory io scheduler
ide0 at 0x80920900-0x80920907,0x80920938 on irq 5
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 31360 sectors (16 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=490/2/32
hda: hda1

The last few lines of text indicate that the driver has been able to read the geometry of the CF card. It also indicates what partitions it can detect (in my case, only 1 primary partition).

My suggestion would be to try another brand of CF card (or at the very least, another CF card) and see if that causes the same problem.

One other issue might have to do with the romfs. Try the following command:

ls -l /dev/hda

It should produce the following output

brw------- 1 root root 3, 0 Jan 1 1970 /dev/hda
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
21 years ago
One other suggestion:

As I understand it, you're trying to setup a CF card as a writable filesystem in order to upload your apps for running?

One of my favourite methods of running one-shot apps is to upload to one of the ram filesystems that are currently mounted.

As an example, if you're using a full filesystem setup, then there should be 2 mounted ext2 filesystems that exist on ramdisks.

# mount rootfs on / type rootfs (rw) /dev/root on / type romfs (ro) /dev/ram0 on /var type ext2 (rw) /dev/ram1 on /tmp type ext2 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)

Notice the /var and /tmp lines.

I usually perform a chmod 777 on the /tmp directory, connect via FTP using the "nios" and "uClinux" username/password combo, then upload to the /tmp directory.

It's a quick a dirty way of running apps without rebuilding and reuploading the filesystem.

If you want more info on the above procedure, just let me know.

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How to build applications

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