RE: [lwip-users] Interniche and lwIP (was: how to send udp messages circularly ?)

[Bill Auerbach]

>>I have their Cyclone III 8.1 NEEK development kit and it had nothing lwIP
>>related in it except for an Ethernet driver for the lan91c111 in files:
>
>I think the last version I checked it with was 7.0, but you had to
>manually select to install it during setup. Do they only deliver the
>Interniche stack with current versions? That's too bad :-(

They supply only Interniche for the following reasons:

1. It's allegedly supported - most code is Interniche's, some is Altera's.
2. It supports Altera's Triple Speed Ethernet for the Cyclone II/III and
Stratix.  I found no driver for this TSE for lwip.

But the problems/disadvantages with Interniche:

1. Interniche requires uC/OS-II.  They have a "super loop" non-OS interface
but it's undocumented and I found no evidence of anyone saying they got it
to work.
2. It has a nominal fee for the basic stuff.  Add-ons (SNMP, etc.) cost
more.
3. Even the lowest level parts of their Ethernet driver are tied into
Interniche source and data structures.  This makes porting lwIP to the TSE
very difficult.
4. Their TSE driver is buggy - even in the parts that can be adapted for use
with lwIP.  One bug is evident by a compiler warning in production code. I
had no problem locking up their driver in testing.
5. Their driver is inefficient (e.g., 4-deep function calls to set up DMA,
the TX routine polls waiting for each TX packet to be sent, if the TX is
unaligned, there is a memcpy in the driver to an aligned buffer which is
then TXed, etc.).
6  They support scatter-gather DMA in hardware but their driver doesn't take
advantage of it.
7. Software timing loops may have to be adjusted to allow auto-negotiation
to complete.
8. They document max 108MbS on a GigE link using as optimized a hardware
system as they could including hardware checksumming.
9. It's not nearly as configurable as lwIP.

The good parts:

1. It works out of the box.  But bugs are evident if it's stressed in any
way and under some error conditions.
2. The scatter-gather DMA is nice if utilized.
3. The included WEB server is fairly complete.

Bill