RE: iFCP: Responses to David Black iFCP Technical review comment s

[Charles Monia <cmonia@NishanSystems.com>]

Hi:

I believe the rule for arbitrated loop support is that loop primitives must
be emulated by the local gateway.  The iFCP protocol does not support the
forwarding of loop control primitives to a remote gateway for emulation.

Charles
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Black_David@emc.com [mailto:Black_David@emc.com]
> Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 11:52 PM
> To: cmonia@NishanSystems.com; ips@ece.cmu.edu
> Subject: RE: iFCP: Responses to David Black iFCP Technical review
> comment s 
> 
> 
> I think this is the crucial point:
> 
> > The primitives with the behavior you ascribe to LINIT are 
> those such as
> LIRP
> > (Loop Initialization Report Position) and LILP (Loop 
> Initialization Loop
> > Position), which are frames serviced sequentially as they 
> flow though
> > NL_Ports on the loop. The loop primitive semantics may 
> emulated locally by
> > the gateway implementation and need not be propagated by 
> iFCP.  How the
> > gateway populates the loop with emulated NL_Ports is up to the
> > implementation.
> 
> Yes, I did get confused about which primitive was which ...
> The important thing to state here is that an iFCP 
> implementation MUST NOT
> forward LIRP, LILP and the like over IP.  The result is that 
> an FC-AL loop
> cannot include any iFCP inter-gateway links, and the topology 
> discussion
> of how iFCP participates in an FC fabric needs to reflect this.
> 
> The resolution of the "port behind multiple gateways" issue looks ok.
> 
> Thanks,
> --David
> ---------------------------------------------------
> David L. Black, Senior Technologist
> EMC Corporation, 42 South St., Hopkinton, MA  01748
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