Hi Jared,
I have been having troubles getting Netconsole to work on eTSEC2 of a MPC8548 chip. I was hoping that maybe someone here might be able to help me.
I'm currently using U-Boot v2009.01. Using the bash script code located in the README.Netconsole file, I have been able to successfully transmit data from the 8548 to my host machine over netcat (using v0.7.1 on Fedora Core 11). I've tested that this path works consistently by only piping stdout to 'nc'.
My problem comes when I try to send data from the host machine to the 8548 (piping stdin to 'nc'). It seems like the data is getting transmitted by Netconsole (verified using wireshark), but it isn't getting consistently received by U-Boot. I set the ET_DEBUG flag to 1 so that I could get extra debug information. On rare occasions I have seen that packets are getting received, but this is very rarely. I do know that the connection is OK. I am able to transfer files using tftp without any problems. On one occasion I was able to print out an environment variable (a small victory), but it happened randomly.
Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You should check what your actual network driver is doing. As U-Boot is not interrupt driven, the big question is if and how packets on the network interface are buffered when U-Boot is not currently idle waiting.
Unfortunately I have to admit that I do not know the exact control flow of netconsole coupled to the tsec driver, but what you could do is to trace tsec_halt and startup_tsec. Maybe they are called too often and/or take too long...
Cheers Detlev