Quartus Programmer II TCL flash *.pof file - tcl

Is there a script to upload a *.pof file using TCL Scripting through Quartus Programmer on my FPGA?
Preferably from the command line because i want integrate it into my custom software.

If you just want a command-line utility you can run quartus_pgm like this:
quartus_pgm -z --mode=JTAG --operation="p;/path/to/image.sof#2"
where #2 indicates the device in the JTAG chain to program. You might also be interested in quartus_jli which writes JAM files.
For full details look at the Quartus II Scripting Reference Manual. I'm not sure whether you can use the JTAG package directly from TCL though, the documentation suggests only from a shell in SignalTap (see table 3).

Related

How to use Chisel C++ emulator

How to use the C++ files generated by the Chisel compiler? the documentations are not clear on this, is there any other source to point me to it? I am really clueless on this, specially that I don't know C++.
Say for example for a simple adder circuit Adder.scala I will get the following files related to the emulator:
Adder.cpp, Adder.h, Adder-emulator.cpp, emul_api.h, emulator.h and sim_api.h.
For which I can compile by running
g++ Adder.cpp Adder-emulator.cpp
This generates the output a.out running this in the terminal generates three more files that I have no clue what they are.
00003710.cmd, 00003710.in and 00003710.out.
The C++ code is used to build an emulation of your design. You need to also define a tester that will drive the emulation, using poke() to set signal values, and peek() or expect() to read them.
You should not be compiling the C++ yourself. If you pass the --genHarness and --test options to Chisel, it will compile the C++ code, build the emulation and run your tester to drive it.
Have a look at the chisel-tutorial code for examples of this process.

How to untar *.tar.bz2 using tcl in windows

Is there any TCL package to untar .tar.bz2 files?
I tried TCL tar library but I could not able to achieve it.
Thanks in advance.
This isn't trivial. You'll need something to decompress the tar.bz2 file — I've found some source code at http://download.gna.org/bztcl/0.6/ but I can't verify that it will work easily for you on Windows — and you can then use the tar library that you've already found. The bztcl build apparently needs tclmore too — see http://download.gna.org/tclmore/0.7/ — and you'll need to have a C compiler available, and probably a build of the bzip2 library too.
Due to the complex nature of the bzip2 compression format, I don't think there's ever been anyone who's written a pure Tcl decompressor for it.

TCL : Regarding init.tcl file in TCL

Can anyone explain me what is the use of init.tcl?
When actually it is loaded by the TCL interpreter?
The description for this file is shown as
startup file for TCL .
But According to my knowledge .tclshrc is the start up file.
Can anyone explain this?
Actually, init.tcl is the first file that is loaded by a Tcl_Interp*.
Its job is to setup the different package loading mechanisms.
Some programs, most notably tclsh, will source the .tclshrc. This is usually done using Tcl_SourceRCFile.
So init.tcl is sourced for every Tcl interpreter, while the .tclshrc is only sourced by some programs that explicitly do that.
* does not apply to safe interpreters

Building GPL C program with CUDA module

I am attempting to modify a GPL program written in C. My goal is to replace one method with a CUDA implementation, which means I need to compile with nvcc instead of gcc. I need help building the project - not implementing it (You don't need to know anything about CUDA C to help, I don't think).
This is my first time trying to change a C project of moderate complexity that involves a .configure and Makefile. Honestly, this is my first time doing anything in C in a long time, including anything involving gcc or g++, so I'm pretty lost.
I'm not super interested in learning configure and Makefiles - this is more of an experiment. I would like to see if the project implementation goes well before spending time creating a proper build script. (Not unwilling to learn as necessary, just trying to give an idea of the scope).
With that said, what are my options for building this project? I have a myriad of questions...
I tried adding "CC=nvcc" to the configure.in file after AC_PROG_CC. This appeared to work - output from running configure and make showed nvcc as the compiler. However make failed to compile the source file with the CUDA kernel, not recognizing the CUDA specific syntax. I don't know why, was hoping this would just work.
Is it possible to compile a source file with nvcc, and then include it at the linking step in the make process for the main program? If so, how? (This question might not make sense - I'm really rusty at this)
What's the correct way to do this?
Is there a quick and dirty way I could use for testing purposes?
Is there some secret tool everyone uses to setup and understand these configure and Makefiles? This is even worse than the Apache Ant scripts I'm used to (Yeah, I'm out of my realm)
You don't need to compile everything with nvcc. Your guess that you can just compile your CUDA code with NVCC and leave everything else (except linking) is correct. Here's the approach I would use to start.
Add a 1 new header (e.g. myCudaImplementation.h) and 1 new source file (with .cu extension, e.g. myCudaImplementation.cu). The source file contains your kernel implementation as well as a (host) C wrapper function that invokes the kernel with the appropriate execution configuration (aka <<<>>>) and arguments. The header file contains the prototype for the C wrapper function. Let's call that wrapper function runCudaImplementation()
I would also provide another host C function in the source file (with prototype in the header) that queries and configures the GPU devices present and returns true if it is successful, false if not. Let's call this function configureCudaDevice().
Now in your original C code, where you would normally call your CPU implementation you can do this.
// must include your new header
#include "myCudaImplementation.h"
// at app initialization
// store this variable somewhere you can access it later
bool deviceConfigured = configureCudaDevice;
...
// then later, at run time
if (deviceConfigured)
runCudaImplementation();
else
runCpuImplementation(); // run the original code
Now, since you put all your CUDA code in a new .cu file, you only have to compile that file with nvcc. Everything else stays the same, except that you have to link in the object file that nvcc outputs. e.g.
nvcc -c -o myCudaImplementation.o myCudaImplementation.cu <other necessary arguments>
Then add myCudaImplementation.o to your link line (something like:)
g++ -o myApp myCudaImplementation.o
Now, if you have a complex app to work with that uses configure and has a complex makefile already, it may be more involved than the above, but this is the general approach. Bottom line is you don't want to compile all of your source files with nvcc, just the .cu ones. Use your host compiler for everything else.
I'm not expert with configure so can't really help there. You may be able to run configure to generate a makefile, and then edit that makefile -- it won't be a general solution, but it will get you started.
Note that in some cases you may also need to separate compilation of your .cu files from linking them. In this case you need to use NVCC's separate compilation and linking functionality, for which this blog post might be helpful.

Scripting language shells?

Are there any software packages or projects that provide the scripting language shells? I know there's csh for C programmers although not in a sense that it's primarily for programming, but for navigation and system administration. I was wondering if there is something inverted for this purpose? I.e. user logs into a shell that's primarily for programming and then for navigation (something like irb in ruby, but with navigation capabilities)?
I think you're misinformed if you think csh (tcsh) is for C programmers. It's just a shell like bash or ash or dash or ksh or zsh.
The R language provides a reasonably functional internal environment, complete with the ability to save/restore the "workspace" (your variables).
Python has a built-in interpreter, as does Maxima, and some Lisp/Scheme versions, plus you already mentioned irb.
You could also view vim or emacs as the type of programmer-centric shell you're talking about; both can be hooked up to run navigation commands and sysadmin-type stuff without forcing you to leave the editor.
I think the real answer to your question is "powerful shells provide their own scripting language".
Tcl's interpreter, tclsh, is really designed to be a shell. In fact, unlike Ruby where the interactive and non interactive shell are separate, tclsh works just like traditional shells like bash: if run without a script it enters interactive mode but given a script it enters batch mode.
But, it does suck in that it doesn't have readline built-in. So no up-arrow history or tab completion etc. But you can always run it using rlwrap:
rlwrap tclsh
which should give you readline capabilities.
However, I wasn't satisfied (partly because my system at the time didn't have rlwrap and partly because there were a few more features I wanted). So I wrote my own implementation of history and tab completion etc. Checkout my original Pure-tcl readline or the improved Pure-tcl readline2.
It really does act like an interactive shell complete with auto-executing external executables if a tcl command is unknown. And you can even execute interactive programs like vi, emacs or lynx from it. Because it automatically falls back to executing external commands, you can mix tcl and shell like:
foreach x [split [ps aux | grep apache] \n] {
puts [lindex $x 1]
}
This is great because tcl's syntax is much saner compared to bash and sh (ever tried to get out of '"\"\\\\"\ quoting hell in bash?). I personally like tcl but tcl is kind of a love-it-or-hate-it language. People who get it really love it and people who don't really hate it.
But even if you don't quite like tcl syntax I'd suggest you give it a try for this specific application because unlike other languages tcl really is designed to be used more as a command language than a programming language. Read I can’t believe I’m praising Tcl for some of the reasons why.
System navigation (and administrative tasks) are a really different application than programming, and it's hard to find a single shell that does both well. However, I'm guessing that what you're really asking for is a shell that
Lets you easily load the contents of a file and manipulate those contents in-process and with more dexterity than you get using bash and standard unix utilities.
In addition you want the convenience of accessing some of the normal commands for moving files around and navigating the file system.
The good news is that the standard scripting languages (e.g. Ruby, Perl) were meant to do #1 really well, and it's not hard to write/find a library to do #2 any of these langauges.
Because Ruby is what I'm familiar with, I'm going to give you a more concrete example of how you might accomplish this using Ruby.
To do this in Ruby, you would use irb (the Ruby REPL), and the FileUtils module which is part of Ruby's standard library.
To do this, start irb, then run
require 'fileutils'
include FileUtils
(you can put this in .irbrc if you'd like, but I'm not sure I'd recommend that.)
this allows you to have access to a number of the normal file manipulation commands through easy Ruby syntax. You can run other Ruby commands automatically yourself. To run other commands on your system, you're going to have to call them with system.
FileUtils doesn't include an ls command, because it wasn't really meant to be used interactively, so you'll need to write your own. I don't know a way to get good job control at all (that's not to say you couldn't write something though).
The only thing I warn you is that this workflow will be very different than other UNIX users, so you might want to think about being such a nonconformist is worth it, or whether you'd rather build experience that meshes well with other UNIX admins' working styles. It's probably better to get used to the core UNIX utils and the Bourne shell scripting language. (You could learn C-Shell if you want, but there is a well-known FAQ explaining the disadvantages of the C-shell for programming.)
You may want to take a look at IPython. It is an interactive Python shell (with filesystem navigation alongside other nice features) and it also provides a system shell profile to optimize its behavior for system shell usage.
CSH has nothing to do with C programming. It's serves the same functions as the Bourne Shell about equally well, but uses different syntax.
If you want C interpreter, I suggest using cint, which is part of CERN's ROOT system. But keep in mind that it's not useful in the least for system administration and navigation.
I'm sure with a little bit of work you could further extend Devel::REPL (Perl) to provide access to gnu coreutils,
Bash has lots of programming features that aren't ordinarily acknowledged, for example arrays and string manipulation options when expanding a shell variable. Some shells, like zsh or ksh have greatly improved programming features compared to the most common shells (namely bash or tcsh.)