Installation guide

About the PCI-SB StarFabric® PCI Interface Card
2-18 PCI-SB StarFabric PCI Interface Card Installation Guide
Address Routing and Path Routing
There are two ways to interconnect StarFabric-enabled devices:
• Address Routing
• Path Routing
Address Routing Application
Address routing is the PCI-to-PCI bridge method similar to a typical legacy PCI
environment. This is the mode the PCI-SB card operates in by default. All the Star-
Fabric-enabled devices in the fabric appear as standard PCI bridges with a numeric
fabric identification (FID) number, creating a standard PCI bridge topology without
switching behavior or redundant, bundled links to other PCI bridges or expansion
devices.
This application provides a simple, cost-effective migration from a hierarchical leg-
acy PCI topology to the next-generation StarFabric solution that can be used out of
the box without developing custom software.
At power-up, all the StarFabric-enabled devices are discovered and identified by
FID, and the fabric remains static despite physical changes in the topology. If a link
to a device goes down or a device becomes disabled, the device is unavailable to
the fabric and there is no automatic or dynamic reconfiguration of the PCI bridge
topology, as shown in Figure 11.