Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorSmall clarification: the maximum size for a UDP datagram is 64K minus header overhead. 1500 is the default MTU for many/most (all?) Ethernet networks, and if you go over that, it's up to the IP protocol layer to break up the UDP datagram into multiple Ethernet frames. The catch is that both sender and receiver need to have IP stacks that can accept the datagram size you're sending.
It is practical (and maybe today even common) to use Ethernet MTU greater than 1500 bytes. Search for "ethernet jumbo frames"; they work fine with the Altera TSE but I don't recall the scope of the changes to the InterNiche defaults to achieve this. All of the above is general network programming and configuration knowledge. The much more interesting FPGA related topics start with the UDP Offload Example: http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/nios_ii_udp_offload_example It's pretty easy to take that example, increase the MTU, and achieve very high data rates with practically zero NIOS processing.
