Re: [HSSG] fault signalling
On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, Trowbridge, Stephen J (Steve) wrote:
Thanks for your feedback, Stephen.
> Without looking at what it will cost, some of these ideas seem
> appealing. But Ethernet hasn't historically built in capabilities to
> support particular operating environments such as the one you describe
> that would add cost across the board.
How do you categorize autoneg in this aspect? Since it actually does
announce capabilities and also tells somewhat the state of the other end,
and as far as I understand, resides on the link layer?
If we could include a generic communication link that could send data
without the link being up, then this could be extended in the future by
vendors that decide to support it (I do not propose to make optical
monitoring a requirement in the standard, I propose to make it at all
possible for a vendor to support it within the standard).
End customers as me are putting DOM (or equivalent optical monitoring)
into RFQs as "should" requirements for higher end platforms nowadays, and
if a vendor added the capability I described in earlier email, that vendor
would definately have a big operational plus in an RFQ response due to the
operational savings of such capabilities.
It really would sadden me if we missed this opportunity to add a
communication channel to the standard now that could be used in the future
for all kinds of communication, perhaps something we can't even think of
today.
I am an end user, I do not know exactly how to implement this, I'm just
saying that it would be extremely useful for us to have this capability.
--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se