I’m waiting for my pi-smashers to arrive and have started looking for information on how to access the wired ethernet on the pi-smasher from linux. From what I’ve found, there are references to the ethernet pins being wired to the fabric. Am I correct in thinking that a bitstream needs to be loaded into the fpga to link the ethernet to snickerdoodle (black - in my case)?
You are correct. The ethernet PHYs are both connected to programmable logic pins so a bitstream is required to connect the processing system ethernet peripherals to the PHYs. Check out this project that shows the way the ethernet peripherals are connected to the programmable logic through EMIO and routed through a bus converter to the RGMII interface to the PHYs on the FPGA pins.