nxobject parent
I hope the author goes into some detail about how he implements the PCIe interface! I doubt I'll ever do hardware work at that level of sophistication, but for general cultural awareness I think it's worth looking under the hood of PCIe.
Next blog post will be covering exactly that! Probably going to do a multi-part series - first one will be the PCB schematic/layout, then the FPGA interfaces and testing, followed by Windows drivers.
The FPGA he is using has native pcie so usually all you get on this front is an interface to a vendor proprietary ip block. The state of open interfaces in FPGA land is abysmal. I think the best I’ve seen fully open source is a gigabit MAC
There is an open-source DisplayPort transmitter [1] that apparently supports multiple 2.7 Gbps lanes (albeit using family-specific SERDES/differential transceiver blocks, but I doubt that's avoidable at these speeds). This isn't PCIe, but it's also surprisingly close to PCIe 1.0 (2.5 Gbps/lane, and IIRC they use the same 8b/10b code and scrambling algorithm).
The GPU uses this: https://github.com/alexforencich/verilog-pcie . And there is an open-source 100G NIC here, including open source 10G/25G MACs: https://github.com/corundum/corundum
Thank you very much for the references. These look like great projects and I am happy to see that I’m a bit out of date. The vendors don’t appear to be making anything easier though; it appears these projects are still supporting devices by making the brute force effort to build the abstractions to vendor specific stuff themselves.
It uses https://github.com/alexforencich/verilog-pcie on top of the Xilinx PCIe hard IP core, which provides everything below the transaction layer.