Blink from FPGA to Processor Clients

[Daniel Wisehart]

Hello Anders (and your good mates),

Thanks for the updates.  I am interesting in discussing your progress with Blink more, but I thought I would start a new topic as my questions are more focused this time.  You say you would like additional feedback on Blink and I would like to use Blink to get status messages from an FPGA to multiple clients hooked up via Ethernet network connections.  I am willing to donate the FPGA Verilog source that implements Blink if your team will help steer me in the right direction.

The FPGA I am using is in a stand-alone box--what we call Charm--so we cannot count on an Intel processor at the other end of a PCIE bus.  Everything has to come over the network.  Multiple clients are plugged into Charm via 10G SFP+ transceivers.  

Quark, the Verilog derived system that runs in the Charm hardware, collects various statistics about the number of packets sent, size of the packets, maximum rate of packets in 10 us, dropped packets, etc.  As simply as possible I would like to create Blink described messages in the FPGA and send each client his stats.  The clients would like, as simply as possible, to be able to receive these messages--which is a low-priority event--and be able to decode the stats, store them for posterity and display them on an ad-hoc basis.  It is pretty important to the clients that when they suspect a problem they can quickly display current stats and deltas in something like a web-browser, possibly from a laptop or wireless device that does not have much (anything?) of Blink installed or the installation is quick and almost automatic.  

As a bonus, if the FPGA can understand how to create SNMP traps from a Blink description, that would help the clients who expect to get status "the old way".

Now there are no issues of low latency in status messages so I am not going to push Blink in that direction for now, but if I can come up with a simple FPGA to processor message link that is described by Blink and it is made easier by using Blink, it would be a win for me.

Care to help?  Many thanks, always,

Daniel