Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorI don't see any reason why the PHY chip wouldn't negotiate a gigabit speed if the other side advertises it. The autonegotiation is independent from the PHY-TSE interface so it should go to gigabit whatever happens on the FPGA side, except if the PHY MDIO registers controlling the gigabit function are modified by the driver. AFAIK the Altera driver doesn't modify those registers.
Did you try to connect the board to something else than your PC with the embedded OS? Just to see if it isn't an incompatibility between this PC and the Marvel PHY? The only other case where I saw a PHY negotiating a lower speed than what it was supposed to was when it was receiving a clock that was slightly out of spec, but I don't think it's the case here.
