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Re: RUNT Packets




Hi,

I have to disagree with your statement of "The MAC silently discards packets
that are shorter than the minimum". When MAC is receiving a packet and
forwarding the packet data to the host. If the the EOP comes before 64th
byte,
MAC needs to inform host to discard the packet and that packet needed to be
counted in RMON. Otherwise we will see packets disappear(packet counts
mis-match) if they are shortened by what ever reasons.

Standard doesn't need to say anything about it, but saying "The MAC silently
discards packets that are shorter than the minimum"  is not good. And I
believe most MACs in the market count undersized packets.

Of course, most undersized packets don't come with good CRC. But we can't
make this kind of assumption.

Regards,

Louis

Shimon Muller wrote:

> > The important point is that runts are not counted by MACs.
> > The MAC silently discards packets that are shorter than the minimum.
> > It has no counter for them.
>
> Pat is absolutely correct.
>
> > Unless someone is proposing creating a new runt MIB object, runts do not
> > apply to 10 Gig Ethernet because we do not have repeaters.
>
> I do not believe we should create such an object.
> Just ignore the "shortened" frame. This is not something that is expected
> to happen very often. And if it does, there are going to be other errors
> that will give you plenty of indication that something is broken.
>
>                                                 Shimon.