4 ms·

Can someone who knows more comment on if this actually makes sense and for what applications and/or constraints? Maybe it makes sense when performance/power/cos

Can someone who knows more comment on if this actually makes sense and for what applications and/or constraints? Maybe it makes sense when performance/power/cost is figured in etc? Just curious as to the OP's motives.

zik 10y ago
I suspect it's more for fun than anything. It should make a very fast web server for static content if he ever finishes it though. I note that he's finished implementing ARP but not ICMP yet. That means he has TCP still to implement and then HTTP. That's a lot of work still to do.
mozumder 10y ago
It's very much in the beginning step. He's at layer 2 of the network stack - ethernet data-link-layer - so has a long, long ways to go before being a web server. Making a hardware-only web server is definitely something doable, you'd just need massive numbers of users hitting one server to make it worthwhile. What would have been more interesting would be serving applications, instead of static web files, since serving static files is a solved problem that doesn't need speedup. Otherwise it would be a great teaching/learning tool for VHDL hardware.
- foota 10y ago
  It seems like a hardware implementation of the lower networking stack would lend itself as easily to a hardware application gateway as it would to a hardware static http server?
jackgavigan 10y ago
You can implement the whole OSI stack in hardware, thereby drastically improving performance. It's probably overkill for a webserver but there are other applications where reducing latency is highly desirable: http://web.stanford.edu/~hlitz/papers/hft_fpga.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~hlitz/papers/hft_fpga.pdf
rasz_pl 10y ago
motives were for the lulz mostly http://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/need-some-advice-on-transferring-data-from-lvds-to-ethernet-around-60-mbits/new/?topicseen#new http://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/need-some-advi...

zik 10y ago

I suspect it's more for fun than anything. It should make a very fast web server for static content if he ever finishes it though. I note that he's finished implementing ARP but not ICMP yet. That means he has TCP still to implement and then HTTP. That's a lot of work still to do.

mozumder 10y ago

It's very much in the beginning step. He's at layer 2 of the network stack - ethernet data-link-layer - so has a long, long ways to go before being a web server. Making a hardware-only web server is definitely something doable, you'd just need massive numbers of users hitting one server to make it worthwhile. What would have been more interesting would be serving applications, instead of static web files, since serving static files is a solved problem that doesn't need speedup. Otherwise it would be a great teaching/learning tool for VHDL hardware.

foota 10y ago
It seems like a hardware implementation of the lower networking stack would lend itself as easily to a hardware application gateway as it would to a hardware static http server?

jackgavigan 10y ago

You can implement the whole OSI stack in hardware, thereby drastically improving performance. It's probably overkill for a webserver but there are other applications where reducing latency is highly desirable: http://web.stanford.edu/~hlitz/papers/hft_fpga.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~hlitz/papers/hft_fpga.pdf

rasz_pl 10y ago

motives were for the lulz mostly http://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/need-some-advice-on-transferring-data-from-lvds-to-ethernet-around-60-mbits/new/?topicseen#new http://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/need-some-advi...