10GigEthr-03 (iocxgbe) B.11.31.1203 Ethernet Driver Release Notes, Edition 2
10GigEthr-03 overview
Bundle description
The 10GigEthr-03 bundle contains the iocxgbe driver, which supports the following products:
PCIe 10 GbE CNA mezzanine
cards
PCIe 10GbE CNA / Fibre
Channel Combo CardsPCIe 10 GbE mezzanine cardPCIe 10 GbE card
NC551mAT094ANC552mAT118A
NC553mAT111A
Terminology
When referring to CNA (Converged Network Adapter) technology, the following terms are used:
Adapter The CNA.
AVIO Accelerated Virtual Input/Output. An I/O protocol that
improves virtual I/O performance for network and storage
devices used within the HP Integrity VM environment.
Device The adapter as a whole, or an HP-UX device.
Card The CNA, most often in reference to the hardware or to a
specific form factor (such as PCIe mezzanine).
DIO The direct I/O networking feature that allows virtual
machines to directly control I/O devices, minimizing device
emulation overhead that would be incurred with AVIO.
Port The physical connection to the network. A CNA typically
has two physical connections; this configuration is often
described as “dual-ported.”
Function A PCIe function. Each function can be configured by HP-UX
as a single device: an FCoE device or a LAN device. HP-UX
can configure a dual-ported CNA with as many as 8 PCIe
functions (up to four per port) . As many as two of these
functions can be FCoE devices (one per port); the remainder
are NIC or LAN devices (up to four per port).
NIC (Network Interface Card) A function or device that is configured as a network or LAN
device.
CNA overview
The CNA is a PCIe device that can be configured by HP-UX as a number of LAN devices depending
on the system configuration. Most CNAs are dual-ported. Each port represents a single wired
connection to a piece of network hardware, as follows:
• In a Blade Virtual Connect environment, the CNA is configured in Flex-10 mode. Each port
is logically divided into as many as four individual devices, which share the total bandwidth
of the network connection. One of these individual devices on each port can be an FCoE
device.
• In other environments, the CNA is configured as two individual devices per port, one FCoE
and one LAN device, depending on the hardware configuration, both sharing the bandwidth
of the network connection.
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