TC9204M
Preliminary Data Sheet
7
Broadcast Throttling
In case of excessive broadcast, TC9204M will throttle the broadcast traffic based on buffer memory
loading. Both global buffer pool loading and source port loading are considered. The number of frame
buffers that can be consumed by broadcast packets received from an individual source port is
permanently limited to the EEPROM configurable value (contained by
SrcLoadTrsh
field from Broadcast
Configuration Register). The default value is 32 when the EEPROM is not present. Additionally,
regarding the global aspect, broadcast frames are always dropped by broadcast queues overflow. Two
broadcast queues are implemented within TC9204M, one for low and normal priority (Classes 0 and 1)
and another for higher priorities (Classes 2 and 3).
Both filtering mechanisms described above can be avoided by enabling the flow control for broadcast
process. This mechanism can be enabled using the
FcBcstEn
pin shared configuration or by adjusting
the EEPROM setting. In this case the loading thresholds will never be reached and as result no
broadcast packet will be dropped although the filtering mechanism always remains active. If the
broadcast flow control is disabled TC9204M is still capable of taking continuous broadcast frames from
one port and deliver them to all the other ports at maximum speed without losing packets.
Independent of the throttling mechanisms, a bandwidth based broadcast throttling can be enabled using
the
BcstThrot
pin or by EEPROM setting. When this process is active, the receive broadcast bandwidth
per port will be limited to a value between 1% and 31% from the port’s maximum bandwidth. This
percentage is encoded within
ThrotTrsh
field from EEPROM's Broadcast Configuration Register. Default
value is 5 (%). Whenever the broadcast traffic bandwidth exceeds the above limit some broadcast
frames will be randomly dropped in order to precisely meet the enforced bandwidth.
TC9204M has the ability to give an indication about its status, from the broadcast packets handling issue
perspective. Its
BcstLED
pin can signal either if the incoming broadcast packets are dropped or if
broadcast packets overflow a certain threshold. During reset, this pin has the meaning of
BcstCfg
shared configuration pin. If this pin is sampled low at reset, the BcstLED will behave as a broadcast
packets dropping indicator, it lights periodically whenever a broadcast packet is dropped due to buffer
overflow. If this pin is sampled high at reset, the led will light periodically whenever the percentage of the
received broadcast packets bandwidth in the last second to the whole port bandwidth exceeds a certain
threshold specified in the EEPROM. The default value for this threshold is 40% from the whole
bandwidth per port.
8
Port Mirroring
Although TC9204M is a smart switch, it has the ability to set a pair of mirroring ports. This feature is
available only through EEPROM settings. The port mirroring feature can be enabled by setting a value of
‘1’ in either
EnTxMirror
field from EEPROM’s
PortMirrorConfig
register or
EnRxMirror
field from the
same register, or both.
When port-mirroring feature has been enabled, the
SourcePort
field from EEPROM’s
PortMirrorConfig
register selects the monitored port while
DestinationPort
field from EEPROM’s
PortMirrorConfig
register selects the monitoring port. The traffic on the monitored (mirror source) port will be forwarded to
the monitor port (mirror destination). Both ports can be any of the TC9204M’s ports.
If
EnRxMirror
field is set to ‘1’ then all the incoming traffic of the mirror source port will be simultaneously
forwarded towards its due destination and to the monitoring port. The bad CRC / undersized frames will
be filtered out.
If
EnTxMirror
field is set to ‘1’ then all the outgoing traffic of the mirror source port will be also forwarded
to the monitoring port.
Confidential.
Copyright
2003, IC Plus Corp.
21/49
July 29, 2003
TC9204M-DS-R05