all T4 and T5 based cards and is useful for analyzing TSO, LRO, TOE, and
for general purpose monitoring without tapping any cxgbe or cxl ifnet
directly.
Tracers on the T4/T5 chips provide access to Ethernet frames exactly as
they were received from or transmitted on the wire. On transmit, a
tracer will capture a frame after TSO segmentation, hw VLAN tag
insertion, hw L3 & L4 checksum insertion, etc. It will also capture
frames generated by the TCP offload engine (TOE traffic is normally
invisible to the kernel). On receive, a tracer will capture a frame
before hw VLAN extraction, runt filtering, other badness filtering,
before the steering/drop/L2-rewrite filters or the TOE have had a go at
it, and of course before sw LRO in the driver.
There are 4 tracers on a chip. A tracer can trace only in one direction
(tx or rx). For now cxgbetool will set up tracers to capture the first
128B of every transmitted or received frame on a given port. This is a
small subset of what the hardware can do. A pseudo ifnet with the same
name as the nexus driver (t4nex0 or t5nex0) will be created for tracing.
The data delivered to this ifnet is an additional copy made inside the
chip. Normal delivery to cxgbe<n> or cxl<n> will be made as usual.
/* watch cxl0, which is the first port hanging off t5nex0. */
# cxgbetool t5nex0 tracer 0 tx0 (watch what cxl0 is transmitting)
# cxgbetool t5nex0 tracer 1 rx0 (watch what cxl0 is receiving)
# cxgbetool t5nex0 tracer list
# tcpdump -i t5nex0 <== all that cxl0 sees and puts on the wire
If you were doing TSO, a tcpdump on cxl0 may have shown you ~64K
"frames" with no L3/L4 checksum but this will show you the frames that
were actually transmitted.
/* all done */
# cxgbetool t5nex0 tracer 0 disable
# cxgbetool t5nex0 tracer 1 disable
# cxgbetool t5nex0 tracer list
# ifconfig t5nex0 destroy
filters working. (All other filters - switch without L2 info rewrite,
steer, and drop - were already fully-functional).
Some contrived examples of "switch" filters with L2 rewriting:
# cxgbetool t4nex0 iport 0 dport 80 action switch vlan +9 eport 3
Intercept all packets received on physical port 0 with TCP port 80 as
destination, insert a vlan tag with VID 9, and send them out of port 3.
# cxgbetool t4nex0 sip 192.168.1.1/32 ivlan 5 action switch \
vlan =9 smac aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff eport 0
Intercept all packets (received on any port) with source IP address
192.168.1.1 and VLAN id 5, rewrite the VLAN id to 9, rewrite source mac
to aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff, and send it out of port 0.
MFC after: 1 week
Reference code that shows how to get a packet's timestamp out of
cxgbe(4). Disabled by default because we don't have a standard way
today to pass this information up the stack.
The timestamp is 60 bits wide and each increment represents 1 tick of
the T4's core clock. As an example, the timestamp granularity is ~4.4ns
for this card:
# sysctl dev.t4nex.0.core_clock
dev.t4nex.0.core_clock: 228125
MFC after: 1 week
