On Oct 30, 2009, at 4:04 PM, Ralph Blach wrote:
Can wireshark along with the nic and phy be setup to view the pause
packets which are generated by the phy?
PAUSE frames received by the network adapter on which you're
capturing, or PAUSE frames sent by the network adapter on which you're
capturing?
For PAUSE frames received by the adapter on which you're capturin,
that depends on whether the adapter in question can be configured to
pass those frames to the host; I don't know whether particular
adapters do that by default, or have to be configured to do that.
For PAUSE frames sent by the adapter on which you're capturing, the
adapter almost certainly will *not* provide a copy of them to the host
- outgoing frames are "captured" by the networking stack and passed on
to the OS's packet capture mechanism before being handed to the
adapter; they are not sent back up to the host by the adapter.
Therefore, you almost certainly won't see PAUSE frames sent by the
adapter on which you're capturing.
If you can capture incoming PAUSE frames, the main branch version of
Wireshark (1.3.x), and probably the 1.2.x versions (and possibly the
1.0.x versions) will be able to recognize and dissect those frames as
PAUSE frames.
