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BEWARE of Quartus JTAG Programmer on Linux

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martin-cejpMartin Cejp 04/29/2018 at 08:094 Comments

If you plug in your eBay "Altera USB Blaster" and try to talk to you device, chances are you get an error such as this: 

/opt/intelFPGA_lite/17.1/quartus/bin> ./jtagconfig -d
1) USB-Blaster [2-2]
  Unable to read device chain - JTAG chain broken

  Captured DR after reset = ()
  Captured IR after reset = ()
  Captured Bypass after reset = ()
  Captured Bypass chain = ()
  JTAG clock speed 6 MHz

This would usually indicate that something is wrong with your board, the power, the FPGA, or perhaps the programming cable. Don't despair!

There is a known issue which is still present in the latest versions of Quartus. It has to do with a library called libudev. It is easy to find solutions for various distros, but I haven't seen one specifically for Fedora (27). In my case, what worked was:

ln -s /lib64/libudev.so.1 /lib64/libudev.so.0

Now the board is detected and can be programmed.

What have I learned? If you can't 1-800-JTAG to your board, check with a known-good board to quickly find issues on the PC side.

Discussions

korane7208 wrote 06/18/2021 at 17:21 point

thanks for the solution! i was going nuts as well!

in my case of ubuntu 21.04, libudev.so.1 was in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ instead

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Alain Lou wrote 02/07/2021 at 02:43 point

@dist.sys.engineer 


I'm not sure I totally understood your error, but here are some things you could try:

1. Configure udev:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEi8nqpQv60

(you may need to reboot after configuring udev)

2. Plugging in stuff in the "right" order (this is what solved my problem on RHEL 8)

community.intel.com/t5/Intel-Quartus-Prime-Software/USB-Blaster-Unable-to-read-device-chain-JTAG-chain-broken/m-p/180907#M45366

(see the comment starting with "I find the issue: The USB-blaster must first be powered from the board and then connected to the PC.")

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dist.sys.engineer wrote 01/27/2021 at 22:27 point

Good Afternoon and Thank You for helping resolve this issue.

I have tried everything, scouring the internet for days to use my Altera USB Blaster on Ubuntu 20.  It works with the drivers on my windows machine but I do all of my development on my Ubuntu laptop.  I have set the permissions, but I get an error message from dmesg|tail when I first plug in my device to my PC.  Also, installed Quartus II, and jtagd --debug shows a message can't claim interface.  jtagconfig says that the chain is already in use.  I took screenshots and have them on my developer blog here

https://codeandbuildit.com/2021/01/27/fpga-buck-boost-01-27-2021-programming-fpga/

Any help is greatly appreciated.  Kind Regards,

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tommy-hackaday.io wrote 06/15/2019 at 06:55 point

Thanks that worked for me!  I was going nuts.

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