I would like to suggest the inclusion of the PIO port width in system.h in future releases
Background:
A PIO port's description in
system.h has the following form:
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div>
--- Quote Start ---
#define CP2_GALVOSTRT_NAME "/dev/cp2_galvoStrt"# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_TYPE "altera_avalon_pio"# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_BASE 0x00A00950# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_DO_TEST_BENCH_WIRING 0# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_DRIVEN_SIM_VALUE 0x0000# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_HAS_TRI 1# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_HAS_OUT 0# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_HAS_IN 0# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_CAPTURE 0# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_EDGE_TYPE "NONE"# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_IRQ_TYPE "NONE"# define CP2_GALVOSTRT_FREQ 60000000[/b]
--- Quote End ---
Some of this is useful from the software point of view, a big part of it is not.
Unfortunately the width of the port is not specified, although this is a very important parameter when writing generic code which adapts automatically to the hardware.
For instance handling of overflow and signed numbers to and from a PIO port requires knowledge of the port width in order to work. As it is now, this information has to be brought "manually"/"mentally" over from the sopc builder into the NIOS project. A procedure which is error prone.
What do you think of that suggestion, or have I overlooked a method for achieving this otherways?
regards
