I broke open the pipeline latches that connect the 2 MACs and did a signal tap read on the avalon bus coming from RGMII, but still nothing on the uart. If this is the case, I would at least expect the error counters to update.
Yes, that was my next thing to check. I have multiple clocks feeding everything. The IP core and all of my logic (including mac register write, read and uart) are on 50Mhz, the FIFOs are running on 100Mhz, and the platform designer instantiations are running on a 125Mhz, with the RGMII tx on a shifted 125Mhz. Do you notice anything off with that?