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Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

Lwip

Hi guys. In my system, l have 2 Nios processors.One of the is responsible for Ethernet communication. I am not using MicroC/OS-II(too expansive for as).I am going to use FreeRTOS with lwIP(TCP/I...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
15 years ago

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lwip :

advantages : free, open source, ported to FreeRTOS....

inconvenients : not stable, hard to implement (site is very confused), Even if there are documents, it is not easy to use. not many examples with MAC/phy.

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I totally disagree with your assessment of lwIP: It is very stable - we make and sell high-end (expensive) equipment running lwIP on Cyclone III (and PowerPC) where problems with lwIP would cost real time and money (e.g. ruining the customer's end product). lwIP has been perfect. The lwIP wiki has gotten much better and the lwIP socket and netconn APIs are well documented.

We don't use an OS and lwIP's equivalent "superloop" mode is easy to use and is documented. There is a low-level (RAW API) which is much more efficient than sockets. And zero-copy Ethernet drivers can be written for lwIP.

I agree that there are not many porting examples. But there are examples that show how lwIP receives packets and expects to send packets. The example missing for you is "How to use the Altera NIOS II TSE driver to send and receive Ethernet packets (without Interniche code)". If you can do this, you can use lwIP.

Bill