Hi Carlo,
my reason for coming back to this thread is your last finding with DMA descriptors.
My environment is a DE2-115 eval board with a Cyclone IV + Marvell 88E1111 PHY.
I want to get Ethernet with u-boot running with a precompiled "WEB_SERVER_MII_ENET0" configuration. The Web application is running hereon.
I have been trying u-boot-2010-06-rc2 + latest 2013 version of u-boot.
In altera_tse.c, both are showing a malloc for the DMA descriptor in SDRAM, not in descriptor memory area.
Changing this detail alone however does not help to produce an ethernet transmission upon ping command.
Did you mange to work out running version of altera_tse.c?
Thanks for any advise or help!