OpenCL Emulator on Cyclone V

Emulation is not Linux only. Just issue:

aoc -march=emulator --board <board> <.cl file>

And then run your executable host code.

You have to set up an environmental variable:

set CL_CONTEXT_EMULATOR_DEVICE_ALTERA=<number of devices>

For emulation, you do not need any hardware connected. That's the point of it being an emulator!

You're just emulating the kernel function, so even if eventually you'll be using the ARM processor as host, you can still emulate to test the functionality of your kernel and the correctness of your host code, not to mention checking the optimization report to see what you can improve before doing a potentially multi-hour compile.

As far as compatibility, Altera's OpenCL is 1.0 compliant (not 2.0), but supports some of later versions' features, like pipes. In any case, it is backwards compatible, so there are no issues there.

Just try it! It'll work.