direct ethernet access

We are trying to build a peice of hardware that can classify packets in the FPGA. Our hardware has been developed, and we can interface it with Nios through HAL, but we are having trouble getting access to the raw packets. Basically, we can't figure out how to access the ethernet device without using the lwIP libraries (and the plug libraries don't seem to work with Nios-II). After reading though all the manuals, we just don't know where to start? Is there a simple interface to the lan91c111 that we are missing? Since we have both the lan91 and FPGA using the bus, we figured we needed to use HAL somehow, probably to set up a DMA to transfer data directly to the FGPA? Any help/suggestions/example would be a huge help.