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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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21 years ago

Nios II Recovery Problem

I've bought Nios I development board(Cyclone Edition), and I want to upgrade it to Nios II now.

I did as the mnl_nios2_board_cyclone_1c20 instructed to write the restore_cyclone_1c20.flash

to the flash, but when I reset the board and load the Nios II recovery design, the LCD shows: "Nios II Error! Can't get MAC address".

What's the problem and how can I fix it?

What's even worse is that the Ethernet part in the mnl_nios2_board_cyclone_1c20 is the one for Nios I.

5 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    21 years ago

    This is a known problem (I think).

    I believe that the workaround was to use a hub. The patch release has this fixed. (to be distributed very soon).

    I'll ask others if there was another workaround.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    21 years ago

    This isn't a problem -- it just indicates that the "special" area of flash that we picked in our example designs to store things like the board MAC address got erased. Products that would be developed for an end-user would typically have this sort of thing in a one-time-programmable flash memory, but for the dev boards, we had to use a part of conventional (erasable) flash.

    What you need to do is open a console to the board with nios2-terminal when you reset Nios - this will display a prompt asking for your board's serial number. We run a simple algorithm to calculate a new, unique MAC address from Altera's "pool" that are allocated to Nios boards, and stores this address into flash. You won't need to do this again unless the last flash sector is erased.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    21 years ago

    Thank you, Kerri and Jesse.

    But I still have a problem: I cannot remember the doc's name who mentioned that NiosII does not support GERMS, however, how can I use the Nios I's GERMS X-Commands to modify the network settings of Nios II?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    21 years ago

    Nios II does support GERMS. You need to use legacy mode to use GERMS.

    There is a doc, an350.pdf that tells oyu about it.

    Basically, use the legacy components and then check legacy SDK support.

    ASK if there are more questions.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    21 years ago

    ...about the "X" commands for the webserver:

    These are still supported. The factory safe design no longer runs GERMS explicitly (as Kerri mentioned this is for legacy support), but the 'X' commands were carried fwd to allow you to setup your own IP address, etc... you can just type "h" at the factory-safe design console prompt (accessible via nios2-terminal) to get a list of comands.. xip, xip:123.123.123.123, etc.