Intel® FPGA Software Installation and Licensing

ID 683472
Date 12/04/2023
Public

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4.5. Setting Intel® Quartus® Prime Environment Variables

The Intel® Quartus® Prime software installation process initializes environment variables. In specific cases, you can take advantage of modifying these variables.

QUARTUS_ROOTDIR_OVERRIDE

Use this optional environment variable when you have multiple copies of the Intel® Quartus® Prime software on the same computer and you want to determine which version to open by default.

Note: If you have multiple copies of the same version of the Intel® Quartus® Prime software, the system displays an error message indicating that Intel® Quartus® Prime software files cannot be found when you start the program. The solution is setting QUARTUS_ROOTDIR_OVERRIDE to one of the copies.

QUARTUS_LIBRARY_PATHS

The QUARTUS_LIBRARY_PATHS environment variable specifies user‑defined library paths.

You can use this environment variable to define multiple library paths at the same time, instead of individually adding each path to the user library.

PATH

You must add $QSYS_ROOTDIR to the PATH variable. The $QSYS_ROOTDIR locates the directory at ${installdir}/qsys/bin.

In general, Intel® recommends adding all ${installdir}/bin to the PATH variable to allow running a software without adding the full path.

LM_LICENSE_FILE

The LM_LICENSE_FILE environment variable specifies the location of the license file. However, the Intel® Quartus® Prime software overrides the value of the environment variable with the location that you specify in the License Setup dialog box.

Note: Separate multiple license servers and node locking license files with ":" (Linux) or ";" (Windows).

LC_ALL

You must ensure that your operating system locale is set up correctly. In particular, the locale you specify in LC_ALL environment variable must match the locale settings (such as LANG). If there is a mismatch, the following Perl warning might be generated during IP generation:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed. 

This warning results in IP generation failure.

Note: You can also set the environment variable PERL_BADLANG=0 to avoid the Perl warning.

Sample Setup Script

Instead of setting up the above listed environment variables individually, you can also create a script to set up the environment for a particular version in Linux as shown in the following sample:

Sample setup script for Quartus:
quartus_x.x.bash (executable)
#Setup pointers to version X.X
export QUARTUS_ROOTDIR="<quartus-install-path>/quartus"
export QSYS_ROOTDIR="$QUARTUS_ROOTDIR/qsys/bin"
export ALTERAOCLSDKROOT=<some_specific_release>
export INTELFPGAOCLSDKROOT=<some_specific_release>
export PATH="$QUARTUS_ROOTDIR/bin:$QSYS_ROOTDIR:$PATH" 
# Adding  any /bin under $ALTERAOCLSDKROOT or $INTELFPGAOCLSDKROOT to $PATH if applicable
export LM_LICENSE_FILE=<path_to_license_file>