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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

NEEK: U-boot can't access network

Hi, I'm a newbie to NIOS2 and have been following the Extreme Guide to kiil NEEK with u-boot. I'm trying out u-boot 2011.06 building with the 4.1.2 gcc mmu tools from nios2-linux-20100621....
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
14 years ago

So, I realise that I should probably have put this in the general software forum, rather than this one, but I have it working now.

The Extreme NEEK wiki is wrong (at least with latest u-boot). You can't simply set your ethaddr (MAC address) environment variable and then start using your network. ethaddr *MUST* be set at u-boot boot time or it will not get programmed into the ETHOC EMAC and hence you can't receive (or send?) any packets other than broadcasts.

If you are setting everything up to run with env from FLASH, then you can save ethaddr there and reboot/reload.

It you are only running from RAM (in order to setup the FLASH images maybe), you will have to find another way. I simply added the following to NEEK.h:

# define CONFIG_EXTRA_ENV_SETTINGS "ethaddr=02:00:3e:26:0a:5b\0"

This is a really bad idea - never release code with this in. But it might just get you going. Once you're up, take some time to set up your environment in FLASH and once that's working, remove that above line and do it properly.

Ratbert