OT - Small DNS "appliances" for remote offices.

Thu Feb 19 13:13:09 UTC 2015

Denys Fedoryshchenko <denys at 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