Change for the better

This weekend, we have successfully gotten our router to a point where an excess of packets will not crash our router. The first thing I tried was first make the router a packet generator/ receiver to see if the problem was with the PHY. I wrote a simple C socket program to make a send client/ recieve server. I tested this with the router and as long as the router was receiving/ sending, nothign would crash. Next, under the advisement of Professor Pak Chan, I added a descriptor memory for each TSE. He figured that what was probably happening was that since they were all sharing one descriptor memory to begin with, some information was being overwritten when a lot of packets come in at one time. After adding these descriptor memories, our router would no longer crash. Now, through a brief benchmark test, we have seen an average speed of about 22MBit/s.

Professor Pak Chan also recommended we enable burst mode on the SGDMA but after an initial trial, it seemed to disable interrupts completely. After talking to David, it seems like by eneabling burst, I may have disabled a global interrupt value that I need to re-enable. We will test this tomorrow.