Description

Some members of the Freescale ColdFire family of processors come with an on-chip ethernet device. This package provides an eCos driver for that device. The driver supports both polled mode for use by RedBoot and interrupt-driven mode for use by a full TCP/IP stack.

The original version of the driver was written specifically for the MCF5272 processor. It has since been made to work on other members of the ColdFire family.

There are in fact two driver implementations within this driver package, one standard driver suitable for use with various TCP/IP stacks including at least RedBoot, BSD and lwIP; and one specific to lwIP. The lwIP-specific driver is a streamlined efficient version designed for very low RAM overhead. As a result it is implemented intentionally at the expense of features such as multiple network device support, and network debugging under RedBoot, but has improvements such as zero-copy reception as well as zero-copy transmission if certain constraints are met by the data packet to be transmitted.

Configuration Options

This ethernet package should be loaded automatically when selecting a target containing a ColdFire processor with on-chip ethernet, and it should never be necessary to load it explicitly. If the application does not actually require ethernet functionality then the package is inactive and the final executable will not suffer any overheads from unused functionality. This is determined by the presence of the generic ethernet I/O package CYGPKG_IO_ETH_DRIVERS. Typically the choice of eCos template causes the right thing to happen. For example the default template does not include any TCP/IP stack so CYGPKG_IO_ETH_DRIVERS is not included, but the net, redboot and lwip_eth templates do include a TCP/IP stack so will specify that package and hence enable the ethernet driver.

The choice between using the standard driver, or the lwIP-specific driver is not made within this package, but is instead made in the generic ethernet I/O package CYGPKG_IO_ETH_DRIVERS using the options within the lwIP driver model component (CYGIMP_IO_ETH_DRIVERS_LWIP_DRIVER_MODEL). The standard driver is the default.

All eCos network devices need a unique name. By default the on-chip ethernet device is assigned the name eth0 but can be changed through the configuration option CYGDAT_DEVS_ETH_MCFxxxx_NAME. This is useful if for example the target hardware includes a number of additional off-chip ethernet devices. This setting is unused for the lwIP-specific driver.

The hardware requires that incoming ethernet frames are received into one of a small number of buffers, arranged in a ring. Once a frame has been received and its size is known the driver will pass it up to higher-level code for further processing. The number of these buffers is configurable via the option CYGNUM_DEVS_ETH_MCFxxxx_RXBUFFERS. In the standard ethernet driver, each receive buffer requires 1528 bytes of memory; with the lwIP-specific driver, the size of each buffer is set with the lwIP option CYGNUM_LWIP_PBUF_POOL_BUFSIZE, and multiple buffers are chained if needed to fulfil the requirements of incoming frames. A smaller number of buffers increases the probability that incoming ethernet frames have to be discarded. TCP/IP stacks are designed to cope with the occasional lost packet, but if too many frames are discarded then this will greatly affect performance. A key issue here is that passing the incoming frames up to higher-level code typically happens at thread level and hence the system behaviour is defined in large part by the priority of various threads running in the TCP/IP stack. If application code has high-priority threads that take up much of the available cpu time and the TCP/IP stack gets little chance to run then there will be little opportunity to pass received frames up the stack. Balancing out the various thread priorities and the number of receive buffers is the responsibility of the application developer.

By default the ethernet driver will raise interrupts using a low priority level. The exact value will depend on the processor being used, for example the MCF5282 interrupt controllers impose specific constraints on interrupt priorities. The driver does very little at interrupt level, instead the real work is done via threads inside the TCP/IP stack. Hence the interrupt priority has little or no effect on the system's behaviour. If the default priorities are inappropriate for some reason then they can be changed through the configuration options CYGNUM_DEVS_ETH_MCFxxxx_ISR_RX_PRIORITY and CYGNUM_DEVS_ETH_MCFxxxx_ISR_TX_PRIORITY.

There is an option related to the default network MAC address, CYGDAT_DEVS_ETH_MCFxxxx_PLATFORM_MAC. This is discussed in more detail below.

Optionally the ethernet driver can maintain statistics about the number of incoming and transmitted ethernet frames, receive overruns, collisions, and other conditions. Maintaining and providing these statistics involves some overhead, and is controlled by the configuration option CYGFUN_DEVS_ETH_MCFxxxx_STATISTICS. Typically these statistics are only accessed through SNMP, so by default statistics gathering is enabled if the configuration includes CYGPKG_SNMPAGENT and disabled otherwise.

MAC Address

The ColdFire processors do not have a built-in unique network MAC address since that would require slightly different manufacturing for each chip. All ethernet devices should have a unique address so this has to come from elsewhere. There are a number of possibilities:

When designing a new target board it is recommended that the board comes with a unique network address supported by the platform HAL, rather than relying on users to change the address. The latter approach can be error-prone and will lead to failures that are difficult to track down.

Platform-specific PHY

The on-chip ethernet hardware relies on an external media independent interface (MII), also known as a PHY chip. This separate chip handles the low-level details of ethernet communication, for example negotiating a link speed with the hub. In most scenarios the PHY chip simply does the right thing and needs no support from the ethernet driver. If there are special requirements, for example if the board has to be hardwired to communicate at 10Mbps rather than autonegotiate the link speed, then usually this is handled by fixed logic levels on some of the PHY pins or by using jumpers.

The eCos ethernet driver assumes that the PHY is already fully operational and does not interact with it in any way. If the target hardware does require software initialization of the PHY chip then usually this will be done in the platform HAL, because the choice of PHY chip is a characteristic of the platform.