Re: Proposal for accomodating 10.0000 and 9.58464 line rates
Not only did Shimon and I present the CRS deferral flow control
mechanism to the 802.3x Task Force 4 years ago, we were granted a patent
on it. US Pat No 5,784,559 Full Duplex Flow Control was assigned to
Sun Microsystems, Inc, and issued on July 21, 1998.
After much careful consideration, 802.3x rejected CRS deferral flow
control in favor of the frame based flow control which was eventually
incorporated into the standard. One of the points of general agreement
was that CRS based flow control offered no performance advantage over
frame based flow control, while frame based flow control could be
applied over a variety of media, and at a variety of speeds.
The idea of using frame based flow control as a solution to the problem
of adapting a 10 Gbps MAC to a 9.?????? PHY has been previously
suggested in this debate. As Rich Taborek mentioned earlier today,
there have been no counter arguments to this proposal offered.
I contend that, rather than creating a new flow control mechanism for
10 Gigabit Ethernet, it would be preferable to make use of the flow
control mechanism that we have already defined. We don't need another
flow control mechanism in Ethernet, and we certainly don't need to
rehash old debates.
Howard Frazier