Chapter 11. Routing Packets

The Previous Chapter

The previous chapter described HyperTransport flow control , used to throttle the movement of packets across each link interface. On a high-performance connection such as HyperTransport, efficient management of transaction flow is nearly as important as the raw bandwidth made possible by clock speed and data bus width. Topics covered here include background information on bus flow control and the initialization and use of the HyperTransport virtual channel flow control buffer mechanism defined for each transmitter-receiver pair.

This Chapter

This chapter describes the rules governing acceptance, forwarding, and rejection of packets seen by HyperTransport devices. Several factors come into play in routing, including the packet type, the direction it is moving, and the device type which sees it. A related topic also covered in this chapter is the fairness algorithm used by a tunnel device as it inserts its own packets into the traffic it forwards upstream on behalf of devices below it. The HyperTransport specification provides a fairness algorithm and a hardware method for tunnel management packet insertion.

The Next Chapter

The next chapter describes the ordering rules which apply to packets associated with the three types of HyperTransport I/O traffic: PIO, DMA, and Peer-to-Peer. Depending on the whether compatibility with the full producer-consumer ordering model used in PCI is required or relaxed ordering is permissible, attribute bits in request and response packets may be set or cleared. These bits are defined by the requester and are used by devices in the path to the target, and within the target, to enforce proper ordering. HyperTransport applies dedicated sets of ordering rules for upstream I/O traffic, downstream I/O traffic, and the special ordering required of host bridges and in double-hosted chains. Refer to Chapter 20, entitled "I/O Compatibility," on page 457 for a description of the additional ordering requirements when interfacing HyperTransport to other compatible protocols (e.g. PCI , PCI -X, and AGP).