Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Revision History
- Table of Contents
- Regulatory and Safety Approvals
- Functional Description
- Network Link and Activity Indication
- Features
- Software and Hardware Features
- Virtualization Features
- VXLAN
- NVGRE/GRE/IP-in-IP/Geneve
- Stateless Offloads
- UDP Fragmentation Offload
- Stateless Transport Tunnel Offload
- Multiqueue Support for OS
- SR-IOV Configuration Support Matrix
- SR-IOV
- Network Partitioning (NPAR)
- RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCE
- Supported Combinations
- Installing the Hardware
- Software Packages and Installation
- Windows Driver Advanced Properties and Event Log Messages
- Teaming
- System-level Configuration
- ISCSI Boot
- VXLAN: Configuration and Use Case Examples
- SR-IOV: Configuration and Use Case Examples
- NPAR – Configuration and Use Case Example
- RoCE – Configuration and Use Case Examples
- DCBX – Data Center Bridging
DCBX – Data Center BridgingNetXtreme-E User’s Manual
September 4, 2019 • NetXtreme-E-UG103 Page 79
DCBX – Data Center Bridging
Broadcom NetXtreme-E controllers support IEEE802.1Qaz DCBX as well as the older CEE DCBX specification.
DCB configuration is obtained by exchanging the locally configured settings with the link peer. Since the two
ends of a link may be configured differently, DCBX uses a concept of 'willing' to indicate which end of the link is
ready to accept parameters from the other end. This is indicated in the DCBX protocol using a single bit in the
ETS Configuration and PFC TLV, this bit is not used with ETS Recommendation and Application Priority TLV.
By Default, the NetXtreme-E NIC is in 'willing' mode while the link partner network switch is in 'non-willing' mode.
This ensures the same DCBX setting on the Switch propagates to the entire network.
Users can manually set NetXtreme-E NIC to non-willing mode and perform various PFC, Strict Priority, ETS,
APP configurations from the host side. Please refer to the driver readme.txt for more details on available
configurations. This document will provide an example of how such setting can be done in Windows with
Windows PowerShell. Additional information on DCBX, QoS, and associated use cases are described in more
details in a separate white paper, beyond the scope of this user manual.
The following settings in the UEFI HII menu are required to enable DCBX support:
System Setup->Device Settings->NetXtreme-E NIC->Device Level Configuration
QoS Profile – Default QoS Queue Profile
Quality of Server (QoS) resources configuration is necessary to support various PFC and ETS requirements
where finer tunning beyond bandwidth allocation is needed. The NetXtreme-E allows the administrator to select
between devoting NIC hardware resources to support Jumbo Frames and/or combinations of lossy and lossless
Class of Service queues (CoS queues). Many combinations of configuration are possible and therefore can be
complicated to compute. This option allows a user to select from a list of precomputed QoS Queue Profiles.
These precomputed profiles are design to optimize support for PFC and ETS requirements in typical customer
deployments.
The following is a summary description for each QoS Profile.
Table 42: QoS Profiles
Profile No.
Jumbo Frame
Support
No. of Lossy CoS
Queues/Port
No. of Lossless CoS
Queues/Port
Support for 2-Port SKU
Profile #1 Yes 0 1 (PFC Supported) Yes (25 Gbps)
Profile #2 Yes 4 2 (PFC Supported) No
Profile #3 No.
(MTU <= 2 KB)
6 2 (PFC Supported) Yes (25 Gbps)
Profile #4 Yes 1 2 (PFC Supported) Yes (25 Gbps)
Profile #5 Yes 1 0 (No PFC Support) Yes (25 Gbps)
Profile #6 Yes 8 0 (No PFC Support) Yes (25 Gbps)
Profile #7 This Configuration maximizes packet-buffer allocations to two lossless CoS
Queues to maximize RoCE performance while trading off flexibility.
Yes 0 2 Yes (25 Gbps)
Default Yes Same as Profile #4 Yes