Why do I get an DHCP error when using Lightweight IP stack in the Nios II Integrated Development Environment (IDE)?

Description

The Lightweight IP stack can experience intermittent failures when using DHCP to acquire an IP address. When the failure occurs, the following error message is printed to stdout:

Assertion "dhcp_create_request: dhcp->p_out == NULL" failed at line 1283 in /cygdrive/c/altera/61b169/nios2eds/components/altera_lwip/UCOSII/src/downloads/lwip-1.1.0/src/core/dhcp.c

To workaround this problem, If possible, Altera® recommends switching to the NicheStack TCP/IP Stack - Nios® II Edition introduced in Nios II 6.1. If not, the following workarounds can be employed.

1. Power-cycle the target board and retry DHCP negotiation, which usually results in correct acquisition of an address from DHCP, assuming that the DHCP server is able to allocate IP addresses.
2. Use a static IP address and disable DHCP.