Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Table of Contents
- 1 Regulatory and Safety Approvals
- 2 Functional Description
- 3 Network Link and Activity Indication
- 4 Features
- 4.1 Software and Hardware Features
- 4.2 Virtualization Features
- 4.3 VXLAN
- 4.4 NVGRE/GRE/IP-in-IP/Geneve
- 4.5 Stateless Offloads
- 4.6 Priority Flow Control
- 4.7 Virtualization Offload
- 4.8 SR-IOV
- 4.9 Network Partitioning (NPAR)
- 4.10 Security
- 4.11 RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCE
- 4.12 VMWare Enhanced Networking Stack (ENS)
- 4.13 Supported Combinations
- 4.14 Unsupported Combinations
- 5 Installing the Hardware
- 6 Software Packages and Installation
- 7 Updating the Firmware
- 8 Link Aggregation
- 9 System-Level Configuration
- 10 PXE Boot
- 11 SR-IOV – Configuration and Use Case Examples
- 12 NPAR – Configuration and Use Case Example
- 13 Tunneling Configuration Examples
- 14 RoCE – Configuration and Use Case Examples
- 15 DCBX – Data Center Bridging
- 16 DPDK – Configuration and Use Case Examples
- Revision History
Broadcom NetXtreme-E-UG304-2CS
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NetXtreme-E User Guide User Guide for Dell Platforms
15 DCBX – Data Center Bridging
Broadcom NetXtreme-E controllers support IEEE 802.1Qaz 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, and APP
configurations from the host side. See the driver readme.txt for additional details on available configurations. This section
provides an example of how such a setting can be done in Windows with Windows PowerShell. Additional information on
DCBX, QoS, and associated use cases are described in additional 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 Configuration Menu
15.1 QoS Profile – Default QoS Queue Profile
Quality of Server (QoS) resources configuration is necessary to support various PFC and ETS requirements where finer
tuning 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 43: 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 Gb/s)
Profile #2 Yes 4 2 (PFC Supported) No
Profile #3 No.
(MTU <= 2 KB)
6 2 (PFC Supported) Yes (25 Gb/s)
Profile #4 Yes 1 2 (PFC Supported) Yes (25 Gb/s)
Profile #5 Yes 1 0 (No PFC Support) Yes (25 Gb/s)
Profile #6 Yes 8 0 (No PFC Support) Yes (25 Gb/s)
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 Gb/s)
Default Yes Same as Profile #4 Yes