May 8, 2026

Zynq network driver -- Gem ethernet, the big picture

The Zynq actually has two of these controllers, though the boards I have only connect one of them to the outside world.

The Gem controller supports scatter/gather IO, and checksum computation (for IP, TCP, UDP) can be offloaded to the controller.

Section 16 of the TRM describes the Gem controller. Section 16.3 is a programming guide.

The U-boot driver configures 32 receive buffers. It would be worth looking at the presumably more elaborate linux driver to see what it does.


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Tom's software pages / tom@mmto.org