Case #: 00288368 - Unable to configure Arria 10 GX FPGA Development Kit for OpenCL

@HRZ - The binary I'm using is from the a10_ref BSP design as described in AN807 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/documentation/tgy1490191698959.html . It is provided as part of the Quartus/AOCL install. On my environment it is in intelFPGA_pro/17.1/hld/board/a10_ref/bringup.

Thanks for that command, I'll give it a shot.

I gave it a shot and created the .sof from the .aocx. I configured the FPGA via JTAG the same as in AN807, but replaced the top.sof that comes with the a10_ref BSP with the .sof created from boardtext.aocx (that also comes with the a10_ref BSP). No luck in getting the board to be recognized.

Well, your board might really be broken, after all. Maybe the PCI-E connection is not working correctly or something. Have you tried the board on another machine? In fact, can you post the details of the machine you are using with respect to the motherboard model and what other PCI-E devices you have on the motherboard?

One other thing I can think of is that if the A10 ref board has an on-board flash (it should but I have never used that board) that can be used to automatically program the FPGA after a cold boot, you can program that flash using the OpenCL image and then do a complete shutdown and start. Doing so can help make sure the motherboard is not cutting the PCI-E power and wiping the FPGA during soft reboot.

Hi HRZ - programming the on-board flash with an openCL image was the point of AN807 to configure the A10 GX board. But to do that it says it has to use the "aocl flash" utility - which means the board has to at least be recognized.

I was able to resolve the issue. The motherboard I was using had two PCIe edge cards in use - a 10GigE NIC and the accelerator board. The solution was to put the A10 GX board in the slot that was being used by the 10GigE NIC and vise versa. Again, a bittware accelerator board using an Arria 10 works fine in the original slot. I suspect this is some bug/incompatibility in the motherboard PCIe chipset and the .aocx image provided in the bringup folder of the a10_ref BSP. I found one other thread buried on stack overflow having a similar issue - if I can find it again I'll link it here.

While I can kick myself for not trying this sooner, this whole endeavor was an exercise in "just try stuff until it works" because there were limited handles to debug the issue. An Intel engineers ended up telling me no one had ever followed AN807 on Windows (even though Windows is supported) - which was likely a red herring. Then I was told it would likely on work on Redhad/CentOS and not Ubuntu - another red herring. I had a another Intel FPGA Accelerator board from bittware that is clearly based on the a10_ref BSP working in that slot - which pointed away from HW or chipset issues.

Hi @SSFyTMT​

If I understand correctly you manage to proceed with the Arria10 Devkit setup changing the PCIe slot on your motherboard. Was there any difference on both the PCIe slots ?

Are both of them PCIe Gen3 x 8 ?

--

Arslan

Finally got access to my account again after over a week of being locked out...

Anyway, @SSFyTMT​ I am glad to hear that you finally managed to find the root cause of the problem.