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Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

Maximum ethernet speed available with NiosII + Linux

Hello, I plane to built a system with a niosII mmu and linux on an Cyclone III device. I will use an IP ethernet core with an dp83848 phy. I need to use ethernet TCP communication. What is t...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
16 years ago

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I'm thinking to use something like a DMA controler to improve the data rate, that's why I was asking about the best MAC ip core.

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AFAIK, all decent Ethernet iP-cores and the appropriate Linux drivers do use DMA. The performance is limited by the standard Linux IP-stack, that copies the frames several times. There are "zero-copy" stacks for Linux and for other OSes used by routers, but AFAIK, none is ported to NIOS, yet.

-Michael