Why does aocl diagnose fail on Ubuntu 16.04 (kernel 4.14 or newer)?

Description

aocl diagnose may fail to find Arria® 10 device on Ubuntu 16.04 (kernel 4.14 or newer) even though aocl install step completes successfully (as mentioned in AN 807 for Arria® 10 GX FPGA Development Kit) beacuse of the altera_cvp module that is included in newer Ubuntu kernels.

To check if altera_cvp module is causing aocl diagnose failure in your system, check the "Kernel driver in use" field for Altera Corporation Device listed in PCIe device information:

$ lspci -v

Look for Processing accelerators: Altera Corporation Device

Processing accelerators: Altera Corporation Device 2494 (rev 01) (prog-if 01)

Subsystem: Altera Corporation Device a151

Physical Slot: 4

Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10

Memory at f3140000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=512]

Memory at f3100000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256K]

Capabilities: <access denied>

Kernel driver in use: altera-cvp

Kernel modules: altera_cvp, aclpci_a10_ref_drv

Resolution

To prevent the altera_cvp module from being loaded for your Arria® 10 device, copy the blacklist file attached below to /etc/modprobe.d directory and restart the computer. Administrative privileges are required to complete this fix.

> Download blacklist-altera_cvp.conf here

$ sudo cp blacklist-altera_cvp.conf /etc/modprobe.d/

After reboot, lspci -v should NOT show altera_cvp in the "Kernel driver in use" field for Altera Corporation Device. You should see the Arria® 10 device driver (as shown for Arria® 10 GX FPGA Development Kit in the example below)

Processing accelerators: Altera Corporation Device 2494 (rev 01) (prog-if 01)

Subsystem: Altera Corporation Device a151

Physical Slot: 4

Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16

Memory at f3140000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=512]

Memory at f3100000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256K]

Capabilities: <access denied>

Kernel driver in use: aclpci_a10_ref

Kernel modules: altera_cvp, aclpci_a10_ref_drv

This problem is fixed beginning with the FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ software version 18.1.1