About the ethernet of upcoming RK3188 board

[ahmet]

Hello,

I am very excited that you are about to release Rockhip based boards. I wonder if you are going to use external ethernet chip instead of using internal ethernet.

According to the Galland (Who is a known rockhip hacker) internal MAC of rockchips aren't that reliable. He is appreciating external ethernet chip of minix neo x7 in his blog.

http://hwswbits.blogspot.com.tr/2014/01/hacking-into-minix-neo-x7.html

A well suited on-board Ethernet MAC (Realtek RTL8152) as opposed to using the internal MAC of the RK3188, as is done by most other TV boxes, which are riddled with bugs (to list a just few of RK MAC's problems: quirks when connecting Ethernet directly to a PC, stops working on TV-box Linux restart, CPU shut-down upon serving heavy files over SAMBA, ...).

[olimex]

RK3188-SOM will offer both possibilities the SOM have no external Ethernet chip but all signals are exposed so one could use only PHY or add and use external MAC

[ych]

Hm, bad news about internal MAC . We are planing to use RK3188-SOM module in our device and Ethernet (mean TCP/IP) is a main connection channel in it.

Did Olimex developer team notice any problem with internal MAC during testing of RK3188-SOM-EVB?