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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
19 years ago

Gigabit Ethernet on Nios

Hello,

I wrote some application to run on different Nios based boards with lwIP (uC/OS II) via Ethernet.

http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif I really liked how NIOS IDE and all Altera support allowed me to do that.

But know I&#39;d like to replace Ethernet with Gigabit Ethernet and it seems to me that Gigabit Ethernet is not fully integrated in uC/OS II like Ethernet.

I imagine I should write myself a Gigabit Ethernet HAL driver.

It sounds strange to me that Altera provides HW support to implement a Gigabit Ethernet but then the SW support is very limited.

Maybe (I hope!) I&#39;m not considering some important point and there is some other way to drive Gigabit Ethernet with a Nios.

Let me know if you can help me!

Thanks,

http://forum.niosforum.com/work2/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif Marcus

3 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    19 years ago

    Hi Marcus,

    Altera only supports a lwIP HAL based ethernet driver. This means that all the packets send by software will go through the lwIP stack, and because the lwIP stack (software in general) is to slow to support 100Mbit on a Nios processor, you&#39;ll never reach a &#39;theoretical&#39; 1Gbit throughput.

    The problem is that software is to slow to build ethernet packets at high speed.

    The only solution to this problem will probably be building the IP packets yourself and use as many hardware features as you can for high preformance. I don&#39;t know you can buy these hw features, otherwise you&#39;ll need to implement them yourself. I don&#39;t know Altera supports hw gigabit ethernet.

    I need to do the same thing and this is my conclusion after reading and testing a lot.

    Regards

    Ronald
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    19 years ago

    Hi Ronald,

    it seems you have the same problem as me.

    I try to get a Gigabit Ethernet Controller from Intel under uClinux to work.

    No i have some problems with the Altera PCI-Compiler. Some Ideas about that? PCI seems to be the one and only way to get Gigabit Ethernet to work.

    Bye

    Marco