Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorBeware: 7.2 is NOT Vista compatible
I had hoped that Altera would finally support Vista with this 7.2 release. Also their marketing is claiming that Quartus II is now Vista compatible.
It's NOT! Quartus II 7.2 readme.txt looked promising: Vista is listed for both Quartus II and NIOS II, but not for Modelsim Altera Edition. The Altera's Download pages listed Vista under Quartus download, but not for NIOS II. Some indication that something might be wrong ... Since Altera seems to have a trend to publish Release Notes a week later than the actual software (like they did with 7.1 release!), I just have to install 7.2 and see what happens. I had the old 7.1 release installed in Vista (since I had tried it out) but I had removed it. I installed 7.2 without problems (although starting the 72_quartus_windows.exe took about 10 minutes because of Vista's new way to check compressed packages). 1) When starting Quartus II for the first time, it hangs showing just "Initializing Quartus" window. This problem was already present in 7.1. Quartus tries to run bblpt.exe and hangs. Killing bblpt.exe process make the Quatus initialization to continue, it gives a warning message but starts Quatus after all. When I rename the bblpt.exe bblpt.ex so that Quatus won't find it anymore, Quartus starts normally. Maybe this is some old driver issue from 7.1 installation. Otherwise it's an indication that 7.2 is NOT fully Vista compatible... I assume the actual compile operation in 7.2 works, since it worked already in 7.1, but I couldn't test compile because of the major problems in SOPC Builder... 2) SOPC builder disables Aero. No a big issue, but I belive Java packages causing this were updated early this year to be Vista compatible. Why hasn't Altera updated their Java components? 3) Old Custom Instructions in NIOS CPU won't work. Something has changed, I had to remove my own Custom Instruction module from NIOS CPU before I could even try generating the NIOS system. 4) When trying to edit the DDR/SDRAM Controller MegaCore Function, SOPC Builder gives error: "The module could not be edited". Maybe something has changed so dramatically, that I should remove the component and add it again, but why such extra work? 5) SOPC Builder's Generate command and NIOS tools just won't work in Vista! Both tools give the following type of errors: 89967747 [main] bash 5680 fork: child 5052 - died waiting for longjmp before initialization, errno 11 bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable This is most alarming issue, which has not changed at all since the 7.1 release. Both SOPC Builder and NIOS tools use Cygwin tools, which are open source packages, but Altera uses RedHat's commercial version of the Cygwin package. The Cygwin open source community had fixed this fork-problem almost a year ago! Unfortunately Altera has not upgraded their Cygwin package, since the Cygwin package in 7.2 is the same as in 7.1 and 7.0! Since this cygwin/fork issue makes the SOPC Builder and NIOS tools completely useless in Vista, I just can't understand why Altera even tries to market Quartus as Vista compatible! Sure, by reading the "fine print" Altera's marketing only claims that *Quartus II* is Vista compatible (except that in readme.txt Vista is listed for NIOS too!) ... But having only one of their three main tools to be Vista compatible is misleading. So if you thought that Altera would finally catch up Vista with the 7.2 release, that's not the case. And since the SOPC Builder still seems to have some other problems, I would say that this 7.2 release is the worst Quartus release from Altera ever ... Jari
