FPGA-Loader only works after the FPGA has programmed once by "quartus_pgm".

[jfcl]

The FPGA-Loader only works after the FPGA has programmed once by quartus_pgm. It will fail (hard lockup
resulting in reboot) if the quartus_pgm is not run first. Once quartus_pgm has been run once,
the FPGA-Loader will work thereafter.

I'm guessing that quartus_pgm initializes some register that is required for the FPGA-Loader to work properly.

I plan to add code to the FPGA-Loader to dump the FPGA Manager registers and System Managers registers and see what
quartus_pgm modifies.