[brussels-dev] [networking-discuss] [driver-discuss] pausel bits setting within Solaris

[Raymond LI - Sun Microsystems - Beijing China]

Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> Raymond LI - Sun Microsystems - Beijing China wrote:
>   
>> Joost Mulders wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>>> Could we introduce below property into Brussels while keeping current 
>>>> IEEE802.3 defination? Having a property named "ether-flow-ctrl", which has
>>>> below possible values:
>>>>
>>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 0: Disable pause frame flow control
>>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 1: Enable just Rx flow control
>>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 2: Enable just Tx flow control
>>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 3: Enable both Rx/Tx flow control
>>>>     
>>>>       
>>>>         
>>> Interesting reading on this subject:
>>>   http://hardware.mcse.ms/message13052.html
>>>
>>> Flow control per direction is a far better concept than what we offer 
>>> now. I would love to see it implemented.
>>>
>>> Regards, Joost
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>> I think we need a friendly UI for pause setting, while keeping the 
>> ieee802.3 tunable as many as
>> possible. I wonder some users may really tweak these value, isn't it?
>>   
>>     
>
> The ieee802.3 values are *insane*.  Largely because not only do normal 
> mortal users not understand them, but apparently neither do the driver 
> developers... I've found several inconsistent interpretations for them.  
> Compare the usage of bge versus ce versus eri to see what I mean.
>
> We do not need to expose the MII bit values to userland via NDD.   Some 
> of the insanity we can thank IEEE 802.3 for, since they apparently tried 
> hard to ensure backwards compatibility and minimize the number of bits 
> consumed in the MII registers.
>
> What is really needed is way for users to tune a couple of values:
>
> * do/don't (claim to) accept pause frames
> * do/do not send pause frames
>
> For older NICs, these values are tuned together.  You may not have 
> control over whether pause frames are sent or not, in any case.
>
> Its also important that users can see:
>
> * which bits the peer is claiming support for, and
> * the currently negotiated pause support
>
> It might be worth looking at how other operating systems expose this to 
> administrators.
>
>   
Some windows driver implements the tuning via a "Flow Control" pulllist, 
with
"Auto, Disable, Rx Pause, Tx Pause, Rx/Tx Pause" as possible values.

Some Linux driver implements "auto_flow_control", "tx_flow_control" and 
rx_flow_control.

I think that is far easier for users to config what they really want.
>     -- Garrett
>   
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