HANDLING LARGE FRAMES IN A VIRTUALIZED FIBRE CHANNEL OVER ETHERNET (FCOE) DATA FORWARDER

摘要

A switch unit has one frame buffer pool for storing received frames and another frame buffer pool for storing large frames. The frame size in the large frame buffer pool may be optimized to the largest amount of data the switch unit that an FCoE switching is running on can support (i.e., a limitation of zone entries). Should free space be unavailable in the large frame buffer pool, or if a sequence grows bigger than can be supported, the switch unit may still continue to send response frames back to the sender. While the switch unit may store header information of the frame, the switch unit does not store the data of subsequent frames any longer. Once the sequence has been received completely, a rejection message is sent back with an appropriate error or reason code. The rejection message enables the sender to attempt a retransmission or cancel the current request altogether.