Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorI have some more info on this. Just like you Ted I thought this was just in my setup at first. I have a mix of Altera USB blasters ad Terasic blasters and it occurs on both.
Using the custom terminal app I created I was able to trap the error codes and it seems the error being produced by the jtag_atlantic.dll is a disconnect from the jtag server has occured. As I said before this does not happen in the 10.1 sp1 release so there is either a problem in the 2 dll's (jtag_atlantic.dll or jtag_client.dll) that have changed or the problem resides in the JTAG module itself. I have experienced occasional problems during debug as well so I would think this would be in of interest to Altera. Unfortunately of the 372 views I have gotten Ted you are the only one to comment, maybe no one else has seen this issue. As far as the terminal goes I have stopped using the nios2-terminal in favor of my own. I am able to detect this condition in there, release the handle to the jtag and then reconnect which seems to work. My concern is over the other elements I do not have control of (the debug interface or programming utility). I wish Altera would just release the source to these dll's so the users here could maintain them if Altera is not inclined too. Note: We have fixed this issue but still do not have a reasonable explanation from Altera as to why, and frankly unless I want to take the time to provide them with an FPGA build that works on one of their Dev. cards exhibiting this behavior I do not expect one. This caused a lot of aggravation on our end but in the end while working with the FPGA designer we pushed the buffers on the FPGA JTAG module to 512 Bytes each. This made the problem go away and the debugger now can function without dropping the connection after only a couple of minutes. Why version 10 worked with the buffers at 64 bytes but we need 512 here on the exact same project may forever remain a mystery.
