no free buffers for rx

I'm not sure I understand how you made your connections to the packet memory. If you are attempting to do as they describe in application note 440 (http://www.altera.com/literature/an/an440.pdf), then the packet memory needs to be connected to the SGDMA's read and write masters (and only them, not the descriptor masters) and to the a CPU data master.

What I would do to get the best performance in to connect the m_read and m_write masters to the packet memory's s1 interface (nothing else from m_read/m_write, and nothing else to s1) and add a tightly coupled data master to the CPU, individually connected to the packet memory's s2 interface.

And of course once you do that, modify the ipport.h file so that the memory allocation functions use the packet memory.