Data Sheet

Ethernet Controller I210 —System Manageability
642
10.3.7.1 Dedicated Shared MAC and Shared IP Support
The I210 is planned to works in systems where the same MAC and IP are shared between a platform's
host operating system and its out-of-band management controller. In order to support such systems
the I210 supports additional shared MAC filtering options on top of what was supported in previous
products. This section describes these options and the NC-SI commands used to program them.
Note: All the filtering capabilities are exposed via the regular NC-SI packet reduction and packet
addition commands and via the SMBus Set Filtering command. The interface described in this
section is a more abstract interface.
10.3.7.2 Sharing an IP and MAC Address
NC-SI over MCTP will be used in desktop and mobile platforms. These platforms are typically used in
enterprise environments outside of a data center. IP subnets in these environments are commonly
designed such that more than 50% of their available addresses are assigned.
Hence, assigning a second IP address to an out-of-band management controller would generally
necessitate a subnet redesign. Instead, a single IP address is typically shared between the host
operating system and an out-of-band management controller in these platforms.
Because it's possible to bind multiple IP addresses to a single MAC address, a Network Controller needs
to know the IP address shared by a Management Controller in order to deliver packets to it. A
Management Controller uses the Set IP Address command to communicate its IP address to a Network
Controller. The Set IP Address command is defined in Section 10.6.3.14.1.
In order to notify the Network controller that the BMC intends to use a shared MAC, the Set Shared
Mode command (Section 10.6.3.14.12) should be given before programming any filter using the
regular NC-SI commands (Set MAC address or Set VLAN) or the Intel OEM commands
(Section 10.6.3.14).
Table 10-1 Filtering Programming Interfaces
Interface Flexible/Abstract Description
NC-SI (over
RMII or over
MCTP)
Abstract (dedicated
MAC address)
The regular NC-SI commands can be used to allow forwarding based on a
dedicated MAC address. The list of supported commands can be found in
Section 10.6.2. When using these commands, one of the two other modes can be
used to add finer grain filtering.
Abstract (Shared MAC
and IP)
The Intel OEM commands described in Section 10.3.7.1 and in Section 10.6.3.14
can be used to define which part of the shared MAC or shared IP traffic should be
forwarded. When using these commands, the flexible filtering interface should not
be used. This mode is activated using the Set Shared mode command
(Section 10.6.3.14.12)
Flexible
This interface described in most of the subsections of Section 10.6.2.4. It uses the
packet reduction commands to reduce the forwarding scope of the filters set by
the regular NC-SI commands and the packet addition commands to add new
packet types to the forwarding rules.
SMBus
Abstract
The Set Common filter command (Section 10.5.9.1.7) can be used to set the
most common filters. When using this commands the flexible filtering interface
should not be used. When sending this command, all previous filtering requests
are cleared.
Flexible
The Update MNG RCV Filter Parameters (Section 10.5.9.1.6) can be used to define
the exact filtering rules to be applied.