Running multiple consoles simultaneously

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, this is sundaram from University of Waterloo. I have a small doubt regarding running multiple consoles simultaneously. As I have 8 cores on my board, I would like to run multiple programs simultaneously on eclipse. but the eclipse tool doesn't allow this.  

 As I'm new to altera and eclipse, it would be very helpful if someone can help with this process.  Thanks!

[Altera_Forum]

can someone help me with this please?

[Altera_Forum]

I would open the Nios II command line shell multiple times and run "nios2-terminal -i <x>" where x is the instance ID of the JTAG UART you want to connect to. This way you can see all the terminals on the screen at the same time. In Eclipse there is a way to cycle through the terminals (I forget how) but you won't be able to view them concurrently.

[Altera_Forum]

How can you have multiple jtags in the system? I mean is there a way to have a jtag for every nios core on the board?

[Altera_Forum]

Since the JTAG UART can't be shared I would just pair up one JTAG UART per processor. 

 I misunderstood your question. Sounds like you want to create a multi-processor collection to do this. I prefer to do this from a shell script using nios2-download to download to each of the processors. There is an update to the multi-processor tutorial coming soon that'll show how to do this with shell scripts. In 11.0 you should be able to use nios2-download and point it at the .jdi file in your hardware project folder along with naming the CPU you want to download code to. To learn more type in the --help argument to nios2-download.

[Altera_Forum]

Yea thanks a lot.. That kinda solves my problem of downloading the code for different cores simultaneously.. But, I still wanna know how multiple cores can simultaneously communicate with different jtags and I have another quick question.. 

 let's say the code for different processors get downloaded, is there a way for the cores to start executing the code at the same time?

[Altera_Forum]

Just like downloading to multiple CPUs you run nios2-terminal multiple times using different instance numbers to identify which one to communicate with. So you just need to connect a JTAG UART to each processor and make sure it is setup for stdout, stdin, stderr in the BSP settings. 

 Unfortunately you can't start the CPUs in unison. The closest you can get is downloading to each CPU without passing in the '-g' (go) argument to nios2-download. Then when all the CPU applications are downloaded run nios2-download -g (without the elf file) for all the CPUs. This is easiest to do with a script to send the go command to all the processors.