Interrupts and RTOS on NiosII

With an RTOS, you use task scheduling to ensure that tasks run at appropriate timer intervals. This is how the InterNiche stack is used with uCOSII. Task scheduling ensures that incoming IP packets are serviced in a timely manner.

In superloop mode, there is no real task scheduler. Instead, you simply run the InterNiche stack's service routine during your main program loop. There is a timer interrupt that actually forces the Stack to do some updating.

You can actually get higher performance from the superloop method. Obviously you just have to make sure that you are not blocking the loop for too long and thus preventing the stack from having the opportunity to service packets.

I have not yet examined the TSE MAC driver in 8.0. But in 7.2 it was extremely easy to use the MAC in superloop mode. All you had to do was comment out the "#include" directives for UCOSII files. The actual interniche stack that Altera provides requires a little more work. You can find the information you need on the NIOS forum.

Jake