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BL, RF and PHY Management



Title: BL, RF and PHY Management

There have been a number of emails mentioning the 64b/66b requirement to
support /O/ ordered sets, which I believe maps to the definition
of some extra codeword types - ODDD/ODDD is one of these. I mentioned
in a previous email that I think this is actually ZDDD/ZDDD. Is this
the case, Rick?

In any case, I am interested in finding out how this maps to the 10Gig
MAC/ PHY requirements. If we want to have a PHY issue Break-Link
commands to its link partner, or Remote Faults, we cannot rely on
XAUI to transport management control/ status, because it may not be
present. So there is still a requirement to define a Management interface
to the PHY (MDC, MDIO), which would allow access to PHY Control/ Status
registers for management-initiated link restarts, or monitoring for link
up/down status. In this case, the mapping would be from Management
commands/ status into 64b/66b Codeword sequences, and not into XAUI
groups. To do this, we could just use the ZZZZ/ZZZZ codeword, and define
a 66b 7-bit Type called 'BreakLink' or 'RemoteFault', or whatever else
is required.

XAUI only carries Ethernet packets, right? In Fibrechannel space, they
may want to transport more than that, but in our case, I believe we
still need to use MDC/ MDIO for PHY management.

Regards,
Una Quinlan.