[libre-riscv-dev] maybe adding OmniXtend support

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 11:55 PM Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com> wrote:

> It would definitely need to be handled in hw as sw would be way too slow.
> Assuming we have TileLink internally,

 https://www.lowrisc.org/docs/diplomacy/

 woooo...

> the only additional parts needed are
> the state machine to generate the ethernet framing and crcs.
>
> I checked and the current version of the spec is incompatible with the
> ethernet mac layer, so we could share the phy between the mac layer and
> OmniXtend and switch which one is active.
>
> Since we can run memory-mapped devices through OmniXtend, we could have
> external ethernet hw for when we need both standard ethernet and OmniXtend.
>
> We can just switch the phy to connect to the mac layer to get standard
> ethernet when we aren't using OmniXtend.
>
> We could also have things like an OmniXtend to PCIe bridge, which would be
> really handy.

 yeah that would be absolutely superb, as i absolutely do not want to
be putting gigabit+ transceivers onto a first chip, that's for sure!

l.