On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Paul Jakma wrote:

> Firmware 'near' the NIC (I've never seen an explanation of the exact 
> mechanism) interposes itself between hardware and OS and 'hijacks' 
> traffic to that port. It never makes it to the OS.

Ah, googling suggests that when this "Not quite a NIC" has this 
management-port-hijack feature enabled, that it would limit the NIC to 
100Mb/s mode (due to firmware implementation not supporting GigE 
somehow).

Is this performance limitation still present?

Another question I would have: If the management-hijack is active and 
the OS requests promiscious receive, does the OS get the management-port 
traffic? I.e. I suspect this feature *must* either break AMT or else 
network-observability through promiscious-mode operation, is this the 
case? If not, I'd be curious as to how it's done.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma,
Solaris Networking                       Sun Microsystems, Scotland
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/quagga tel: EMEA x73150 / +44 15066 73150

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