Rob
(Elliot),
I
don't think anyone responded to this. I have seen several proposals (one
from Robert Sheffield) that discuss handling of virtual phys (in an
expander) but none talking about logical phys that have been created by the
addition of muxing.
Logical phys for a physical link need not have the same
address, and may or may not be part of the a wide port.
Does
anyone have a proposal on how this (discover and reporting) should be
handled?
Thanks,
Craig
Rob, Steve,
Brian and others involved:
I'm wondering about
SMP Discover and interaction with Muxing. I've read the recent proposal 07-091r0
regarding the Discover extensions, but I feel there are some issues at
hand.
From a higher
perspective, there isn't much difference between 2 logical phys with muxing and
2 physical phys. Each logical phy sends and receives an Identify Frame (IAF). As
such, each logical phy is free to advertise any capabilities it sees fit,
including a unique SAS address. The two logical phys need not send the same
information. The net result is, that the 2 related logical phys may either be
viewed as 2 logical ports, or two phys as part of a wide port. I know that when
Muxing was suggested that being seen as a wide port is what was in mind, but I
can think of several target devices that would like to advertize two different
SAS addresses on the muxed link. There is nothing I can find in the standard to
prevent this, and modeling show it works very nicely.
To the higher level
layers such as port layer of Expander Function, there is no difference between a
muxed link and a non-muxed link. Only the SAS addresses on that link determine
whether the logical phy is part of a wide port or not.
However, this
implies that when addressing a SAS device that has muxing enabled, that it
should report the number of phy as as the number of logical phys, not physical.
And also, it needs to be possible to issue a Discover to each logical phy, not
just physical phy inorder to gain access to the individual IAF
results.
Another potential
solution is to issue Discover for Phyical phys, but have space to report the
capabilities of each logical phy that is part of that phycial phy, eg two
attached sas address, two sets of capbiltiies (both local and remote),
etc
Comments?
Craig
Stoops
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