eth_wr_ready was held constantly HIGH by every test this file ever had, which
is a serious blind spot: on hardware the SPRAM arbiter stalls that port
constantly, because the GC reads the ring over EXI while frames are written
into it. Any address bookkeeping that depends on ready timing is invisible
until ready actually goes low.
T5 repeats T2's 300-byte frame with ready asserted 1 cycle in 3 and requires
the descriptor and body offset to be IDENTICAL to the unstalled case.
Result: contention does NOT reproduce the one-byte body offset seen on
hardware. Under stalls the descriptor is still [0,0,1,48] and all 300 body
bytes land at base+4. So that hypothesis is eliminated, which was the point
of writing it.
Two harness faults found and fixed while building it, both of which produced
false results rather than no result:
- rx_irq and rx_overflow are 1-cycle pulses, and rx_overflow fires on the
very tick that consumes the EOF byte -- inside send_frame. Polling for it
afterwards missed it entirely, so a correctly DROPPED frame looked like a
stall. Both are now latched in the tick helper.
- send_frame read rx_ready BEFORE tick() applied the next eth_wr_ready.
rx_ready is combinational on it, so the loop was a cycle out of phase with
the accept the DUT actually made: it waited on a byte already taken, and
reported "rx_ready never asserted" for a frame that had stored correctly.
Ready is now applied, then read, then clocked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Roflin
f69b4d084a