Guidelines for Developing a Nios II HAL Device Driver

ID 683146
Date 6/12/2015
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.2.6.2. Making Hardware Modifications

If you make hardware design modifications, you must regenerate your Nios II system in Qsys and recompile the Quartus II project in the Quartus II software. In the regeneration step, Qsys updates the SOPC Information File (.sopcinfo) for your hardware design.

If you have a pre-existing BSP, such as the example design, an updated .sopcinfo file requires that you regenerate your BSP in the BSP Editor (or by executing nios2-bsp on the command line). Then you must do a clean build of the BSP as well as the application that depends on it. The clean build is required because the software needs to obtain the new value of the _BASE symbol from system.h.

For additional information about updating BSP files after a hardware change, refer to Board Support Packages in the "Nios II Software Build Tools" chapter of the Nios II Software Developer's Handbook.

In the Nios II Command Shell, to force the SBT to copy or regenerate all BSP and application files, simply perform the following steps:

  1. Delete the application makefile, for example app/bit_bang_uart/Makefile.
  2. Delete the BSP’s public.mk file, for example bsp/hal_my_uart/public.mk.
  3. Execute the create-this-app script in the application directory, for example app/bit_bang_uart/create-this-app. The create-this-app script runs the create-this-bsp script, which in turn runs nios2-bsp.