Re: [E1000-devel] XL710-QDA2 10G breakout

[Lucian-Ionut L. <lep...@gm...>]

We want to use these cards for a TAP solution. The traffic is captured
through passive optical splitters connected to several 10G links. From the
splitters the traffic is then forwarded via a breakout cable to
the XL710-QDA2 card.
We are interested only in received traffic. Is there a way to capture the
traffic on both 40G ports using breakout cables on all 2x4x10G or 2x40G
mode in order to use all physical links (8x10G or 2x40G)? I know that on
40G ports there is a 66B encoding and the frames are sent in round robin on
the 4 pairs of fiber of the MPO connector. But is it possible to implement
in software a method such that to bypass this encoding and capture the
traffic on 4x10G breakout on each of the 2 40G ports while the card is in
2x40G mode (thus avoiding the 4 MACs limitation)?

On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 6:02 PM, Fujinaka, Todd <tod...@in...>
wrote:

> There is a hardware limitation because there are only 4 10G MACs
> available. You cannot have 8 10G ports.
>
> Todd Fujinaka
> Software Application Engineer
> Networking Division (ND)
> Intel Corporation
> tod...@in...
> (503) 712-4565
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lucian-Ionut Lepadatu [mailto:lep...@gm...]
> Sent: Friday, September 09, 2016 1:03 AM
> To: e10...@li...
> Subject: [E1000-devel] XL710-QDA2 10G breakout
>
> Hello,
>
> New user of XL710-QDA2 (dual QSFP) card here. After some google search I
> cannot get a definite answer regarding the breakout capabilities of this
> card.
>
> I would like to know if the card's 40G ports can be split into 4x10G ports
> for each 40G port. I see from the documentations that only 4x10, 2x2x10A,
> 2x2x10B are available but I'm interested in knowing *if this is a software
> limitation or a a hardware one*.
> I also see that the total throughput is 40G but this is not a problem for
> my setup. I need both QSPF ports to be split into 10G ports. So is this
> possible?
>