This is the driver for the Altera Triple-Speed Ethernet (TSE) controllers using the SGDMA and MSGDMA soft DMA IP components. The driver uses the platform bus to obtain component resources. The designs used to test this driver were built for a Cyclone(R) V SOC FPGA board, a Cyclone(R) V FPGA board, and tested with ARM and NIOS processor hosts. Jungo Connectivity offers Driver for Intel PCI Express FPGAs. The WinDriver™ product line has enhanced supports for Altera devices, and enables you to focus on your driver’s added-value functionality, instead of on the operating system internals.

Copyright © 2008-2014 Altera Corporation

This is the driver for the Altera Triple-Speed Ethernet (TSE) controllersusing the SGDMA and MSGDMA soft DMA IP components. The driver uses theplatform bus to obtain component resources. The designs used to test thisdriver were built for a Cyclone(R) V SOC FPGA board, a Cyclone(R) V FPGA board,and tested with ARM and NIOS processor hosts separately. The anticipated usecases are simple communications between an embedded system and an external peerfor status and simple configuration of the embedded system.

For more information visit www.altera.com and www.rocketboards.org. Supportforums for the driver may be found on www.rocketboards.org, and a design usedto test this driver may be found there as well. Support is also available fromthe maintainer of this driver, found in MAINTAINERS.

The Triple-Speed Ethernet, SGDMA, and MSGDMA components are all soft IPcomponents that can be assembled and built into an FPGA using the AlteraQuartus toolchain. Quartus 13.1 and 14.0 were used to build the design thatthis driver was tested against. The sopc2dts tool is used to create thedevice tree for the driver, and may be found at rocketboards.org.

The driver probe function examines the device tree and determines if theTriple-Speed Ethernet instance is using an SGDMA or MSGDMA component. Theprobe function then installs the appropriate set of DMA routines toinitialize, setup transmits, receives, and interrupt handling primitives forthe respective configurations.

The SGDMA component is to be deprecated in the near future (over the next 1-2years as of this writing in early 2014) in favor of the MSGDMA component.SGDMA support is included for existing designs and reference in case adeveloper wishes to support their own soft DMA logic and driver support. Anynew designs should not use the SGDMA.

The SGDMA supports only a single transmit or receive operation at a time, andtherefore will not perform as well compared to the MSGDMA soft IP. Pleasevisit www.altera.com for known, documented SGDMA errata.

Scatter-gather DMA is not supported by the SGDMA or MSGDMA at this time.Scatter-gather DMA will be added to a future maintenance update to thisdriver.

Jumbo frames are not supported at this time.

The driver limits PHY operations to 10/100Mbps, and has not yet been fullytested for 1Gbps. This support will be added in a future maintenance update.

1. Kernel Configuration¶

The kernel configuration option is ALTERA_TSE:

2. Driver parameters list¶

• debug: message level (0: no output, 16: all);
• dma_rx_num: Number of descriptors in the RX list (default is 64);
• dma_tx_num: Number of descriptors in the TX list (default is 64).

3. Command line options¶

Driver parameters can be also passed in command line by using:

Drivers Alternate

4. Driver information and notes¶

4.1. Transmit process¶

When the driver’s transmit routine is called by the kernel, it sets up atransmit descriptor by calling the underlying DMA transmit routine (SGDMA orMSGDMA), and initiates a transmit operation. Once the transmit is complete, aninterrupt is driven by the transmit DMA logic. The driver handles the transmitcompletion in the context of the interrupt handling chain by recyclingresource required to send and track the requested transmit operation.

4.2. Receive process¶

The driver will post receive buffers to the receive DMA logic during driverinitialization. Receive buffers may or may not be queued depending upon theunderlying DMA logic (MSGDMA is able queue receive buffers, SGDMA is not ableto queue receive buffers to the SGDMA receive logic). When a packet isreceived, the DMA logic generates an interrupt. The driver handles a receiveinterrupt by obtaining the DMA receive logic status, reaping receivecompletions until no more receive completions are available.

4.3. Interrupt Mitigation¶

The driver is able to mitigate the number of its DMA interruptsusing NAPI for receive operations. Interrupt mitigation is not yet supportedfor transmit operations, but will be added in a future maintenance release.

4.4) Ethtool support¶

Drivers Altera Usb Blaster

Ethtool is supported. Driver statistics and internal errors can be taken using:ethtool -S ethX command. It is possible to dump registers etc.

4.5) PHY Support¶

The driver is compatible with PAL to work with PHY and GPHY devices.

4.7) List of source files:¶

• Kconfig
• Makefile
• altera_tse_main.c: main network device driver
• altera_tse_ethtool.c: ethtool support
• altera_tse.h: private driver structure and common definitions
• altera_msgdma.h: MSGDMA implementation function definitions
• altera_sgdma.h: SGDMA implementation function definitions
• altera_msgdma.c: MSGDMA implementation
• altera_sgdma.c: SGDMA implementation
• altera_sgdmahw.h: SGDMA register and descriptor definitions
• altera_msgdmahw.h: MSGDMA register and descriptor definitions
• altera_utils.c: Driver utility functions
• altera_utils.h: Driver utility function definitions

5. Debug Information¶

The driver exports debug information such as internal statistics,debug information, MAC and DMA registers etc.

A user may use the ethtool support to get statistics:e.g. using: ethtool -S ethX (that shows the statistics counters)or sees the MAC registers: e.g. using: ethtool -d ethX

The developer can also use the “debug” module parameter to getfurther debug information.

6. Statistics Support¶

The controller and driver support a mix of IEEE standard defined statistics,RFC defined statistics, and driver or Altera defined statistics. The fourspecifications containing the standard definitions for these statistics areas follows:

• IEEE 802.3-2012 - IEEE Standard for Ethernet.
• RFC 2863 found at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2863.txt.
• RFC 2819 found at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2819.txt.
• Altera Triple Speed Ethernet User Guide, found at http://www.altera.com

The statistics supported by the TSE and the device driver are as follows:

“tx_packets” is equivalent to aFramesTransmittedOK defined in IEEE 802.3-2012,Section 5.2.2.1.2. This statistics is the count of frames that are successfullytransmitted.

“rx_packets” is equivalent to aFramesReceivedOK defined in IEEE 802.3-2012,Section 5.2.2.1.5. This statistic is the count of frames that are successfullyreceived. This count does not include any error packets such as CRC errors,length errors, or alignment errors.

“rx_crc_errors” is equivalent to aFrameCheckSequenceErrors defined in IEEE802.3-2012, Section 5.2.2.1.6. This statistic is the count of frames that arean integral number of bytes in length and do not pass the CRC test as the frameis received.

“rx_align_errors” is equivalent to aAlignmentErrors defined in IEEE 802.3-2012,Section 5.2.2.1.7. This statistic is the count of frames that are not anintegral number of bytes in length and do not pass the CRC test as the frame isreceived.

“tx_bytes” is equivalent to aOctetsTransmittedOK defined in IEEE 802.3-2012,Section 5.2.2.1.8. This statistic is the count of data and pad bytessuccessfully transmitted from the interface.

“rx_bytes” is equivalent to aOctetsReceivedOK defined in IEEE 802.3-2012,Section 5.2.2.1.14. This statistic is the count of data and pad bytessuccessfully received by the controller.

“tx_pause” is equivalent to aPAUSEMACCtrlFramesTransmitted defined in IEEE802.3-2012, Section 30.3.4.2. This statistic is a count of PAUSE framestransmitted from the network controller.

“rx_pause” is equivalent to aPAUSEMACCtrlFramesReceived defined in IEEE802.3-2012, Section 30.3.4.3. This statistic is a count of PAUSE framesreceived by the network controller.

“rx_errors” is equivalent to ifInErrors defined in RFC 2863. This statistic isa count of the number of packets received containing errors that prevented thepacket from being delivered to a higher level protocol.

“tx_errors” is equivalent to ifOutErrors defined in RFC 2863. This statisticis a count of the number of packets that could not be transmitted due to errors.

“rx_unicast” is equivalent to ifInUcastPkts defined in RFC 2863. Thisstatistic is a count of the number of packets received that were not addressedto the broadcast address or a multicast group.

“rx_multicast” is equivalent to ifInMulticastPkts defined in RFC 2863. Thisstatistic is a count of the number of packets received that were addressed toa multicast address group.

“rx_broadcast” is equivalent to ifInBroadcastPkts defined in RFC 2863. Thisstatistic is a count of the number of packets received that were addressed tothe broadcast address.

“tx_discards” is equivalent to ifOutDiscards defined in RFC 2863. Thisstatistic is the number of outbound packets not transmitted even though anerror was not detected. An example of a reason this might occur is to free upinternal buffer space.

“tx_unicast” is equivalent to ifOutUcastPkts defined in RFC 2863. Thisstatistic counts the number of packets transmitted that were not addressed toa multicast group or broadcast address.

“tx_multicast” is equivalent to ifOutMulticastPkts defined in RFC 2863. Thisstatistic counts the number of packets transmitted that were addressed to amulticast group.

“tx_broadcast” is equivalent to ifOutBroadcastPkts defined in RFC 2863. Thisstatistic counts the number of packets transmitted that were addressed to abroadcast address.

“ether_drops” is equivalent to etherStatsDropEvents defined in RFC 2819.This statistic counts the number of packets dropped due to lack of internalcontroller resources.

“rx_total_bytes” is equivalent to etherStatsOctets defined in RFC 2819.This statistic counts the total number of bytes received by the controller,including error and discarded packets.

“rx_total_packets” is equivalent to etherStatsPkts defined in RFC 2819.This statistic counts the total number of packets received by the controller,including error, discarded, unicast, multicast, and broadcast packets.

“rx_undersize” is equivalent to etherStatsUndersizePkts defined in RFC 2819.This statistic counts the number of correctly formed packets received lessthan 64 bytes long.

“rx_oversize” is equivalent to etherStatsOversizePkts defined in RFC 2819.This statistic counts the number of correctly formed packets greater than 1518bytes long.

“rx_64_bytes” is equivalent to etherStatsPkts64Octets defined in RFC 2819.This statistic counts the total number of packets received that were 64 octetsin length.

“rx_65_127_bytes” is equivalent to etherStatsPkts65to127Octets defined in RFC2819. This statistic counts the total number of packets received that werebetween 65 and 127 octets in length inclusive.

“rx_128_255_bytes” is equivalent to etherStatsPkts128to255Octets defined inRFC 2819. This statistic is the total number of packets received that werebetween 128 and 255 octets in length inclusive.

“rx_256_511_bytes” is equivalent to etherStatsPkts256to511Octets defined inRFC 2819. This statistic is the total number of packets received that werebetween 256 and 511 octets in length inclusive.

Drivers Alteration

“rx_512_1023_bytes” is equivalent to etherStatsPkts512to1023Octets defined inRFC 2819. This statistic is the total number of packets received that werebetween 512 and 1023 octets in length inclusive.

“rx_1024_1518_bytes” is equivalent to etherStatsPkts1024to1518Octets definein RFC 2819. This statistic is the total number of packets received that werebetween 1024 and 1518 octets in length inclusive.

Drivers/edac/altera Edac.c

“rx_gte_1519_bytes” is a statistic defined specific to the behavior of theAltera TSE. This statistics counts the number of received good and erroredframes between the length of 1519 and the maximum frame length configuredin the frm_length register. See the Altera TSE User Guide for More details.

“rx_jabbers” is equivalent to etherStatsJabbers defined in RFC 2819. Thisstatistic is the total number of packets received that were longer than 1518octets, and had either a bad CRC with an integral number of octets (CRC Error)or a bad CRC with a non-integral number of octets (Alignment Error).

“rx_runts” is equivalent to etherStatsFragments defined in RFC 2819. Thisstatistic is the total number of packets received that were less than 64 octetsin length and had either a bad CRC with an integral number of octets (CRCerror) or a bad CRC with a non-integral number of octets (Alignment Error).