Overview of the ethernet infrastructure
Pre-defined Design constraints
Our goal of supporting the same FPGA board as the previous release may only be realised with a single 100BaseT Ethernet port (the most common type encountered), due to PCB design constraints. Nevertheless it is conceived that 1Gbps Ethernet could be made use of by a different board. However using this version of the FPGA the practical performance is limited to about 2 megabits per second.
Overview of the Remote boot process
Using a custom protocol from a remote PC allows the first-stage boot loader to fit in the 64K ROM of the FPGA. It’s contents are included in the bitstream as before. The boot process involves transferring a kernel and initial filing system of approximately 5MBytes in around a minute.
NFS root file system
The NFS root file system requires a separate server such as a Linux server or laptop.
Future ethernet developments
This release incorporates a ‘ethernet’ core for the first time, but there is of course much more to be done. In the future, we want to integrate support for intelligent I/O, to have the ethernet control the boot process, perhaps with tftp, and to optimise the interface between the ethernet and application cores (for example with DMA).
Please get in touch with us if you have ideas and opinions about future directions we should take. Now it’s time to learn more about the debug system or jump into using it: