Denys Fedoryshchenko <denys@visp.net.lb> writes:
Beaglebone has gigabit mac, but due some errata it is not used in gigabit mode, it is 100M (which is maybe enough for small office). But it is "hardware" mac.
The Beaglebone Black rev C BOM calls out the ethernet phy chip as LAN8710A-EZC-TR which is 10/100 so there's your constraint. The MAC is built into the SoC and according to the datasheet the AM3358B is 10/100/1000.
Another hardware MAC on inexpensive board it is Odroid-C1.
Difficulty: hardware MAC tells you nothing about how it's connected, either on the board or internally in the SoC. Ethernet on Multibus and Ethernet on PCIe (neither likely on an embedded ARM ;-) are both "hardware MAC" yet the bus-constrained bandwidths will differ by several orders of magnitude.
-r Well, i guess for DNS it wont matter much(400Mbit or full capacity). But stability of driverand archievable pps rate on it, due poor code - can be a question. And mostly this products are "Network enabled", but networking are very "lightly" used, not as it is used on appliances, 24/7 traffic, sometimes malicious. About Beaglebone, probably reason is this errata: "While the AM335x GP EVM has a Gb Ethernet PHY, AR8031A, on the base board,
On 2015-02-19 15:13, Rob Seastrom wrote: the PCB was designed to use internal clock delay mode of the RGMII interface and the AM335x does not support the internal clock delay mode. Therefore, if operating the Ethernet in Gb mode, there may be problems with the performance/function due to this. The AR8031A PHY supports internal delay mode. This can be enabled by software to guarantee Gb operation. However, this cannot be done to enable internal delay mode for Ethernet booting of course. " Or maybe they just put 100Mbit PHY to make BOM cost less. As far as i know, Raspberry PI ethernet over USB might be fine for DNS too, but before it had issues with large data transfers (ethernet driver hangs). No idea about now. --- Best regards, Denys