Altera Cyclone IV Programming .elf file to flash?

[digi001]

I am working on a DE2-115 dev board and have finished my design.

Now i need to program Flash memories so that my code will be non-viotile.
I have successfully converted the .sof file to .pof and programmed a Active Serial device EPS64.

However I cannot get the .elf file programmed in the ISSI 8MB Flash correctly. I followed the tutorial on terasic https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=49&No=656


by creating a CFI flash controller ,creating a tri-state bus and setting the reset vector to cfi_flash. I am able to program the flash and everything seems ok, but the code is not running correctly.

Any idea why this could be happening? If i run as 'Nios II hardware' in eclipse the program works great, but if i flash the .elf file and recycle power I get strange things like half of the program works. My LCD display works, but the UART doesn't.

Any ideas?

 

[digi001]

Ok. I got everything working now.

It looks like the issue was with the program running out of flash instead of RAM. To fix this I implemented the bootloader which takes the program from flash and puts it into RAM at startup.

Here are the steps to do this:

In BSP editor I linked everything to on-chip memory except for RESET Vector.

Then in hal.linker I checked all boxes:
allow_code_at_reset
enable_alt_load
enable_alt_load_copy_exceptions
enable_alt_load_copy_rodata
enable_alt_load_copy_rwdata

Then when programming the flash I used the .sopcinfo file rather than .bsp settings options.

This seemed to do the trick. My design now works at full speed and running out of on-chip RAM.