NC-SI
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NC-SI, abbreviated from network controller sideband interface, is an electrical interface and protocol defined by the
Distributed Management Task Force Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit industry standards organization that creates open manageability standards spanning diverse emerging and traditional IT infrastructures including cloud, virtualization, network, s ...
(DMTF). The NC-SI enables the connection of a baseboard management controller (BMC) to one or more
network interface controller A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter and physical network interface) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Early network interface ...
s (NICs) in a server computer system for the purpose of enabling
out-of-band In telecommunications, out-of-band activity is activity outside a defined frequency band, or, metaphorically, outside of any primary communication channel. Protection from falsing is among its purposes. Examples General usage * Out-of-band agr ...
system management. This allows the BMC to use the network connections of the NIC ports for the management traffic, in addition to the regular host traffic.OCP NIC 3.0 Specification 1.00 (PDF) in Open Compute Project Server/Mez

/ref> The NC-SI defines a control communication protocol between the BMC and NICs. The NC-SI is supported over several transports and physical interfaces.


Hardware interface

The RMII-based transport (RBT) interface defined by NC-SI is based on the Media Independent Interface, RMII specification with some modifications that allow connection of multiple network controllers to a single BMC. The NC-SI can also operate over a variety of other electrical interfaces, including SMBus and
PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...
when used over the Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP). The table below sums up the signals comprising the RBT interface.


Traffic types

The NC-SI defines two fundamental types of traffic, pass-through and control traffic. Pass-through traffic consists of data exchanged between the BMC and the network via the NC-SI interface. Control traffic is used to inventory and configure aspects of NIC operation and control the NC-SI interface. Control traffic is broken down into three sub-types: * Commands, sent from the BMC to one of the NICs * Responses, sent by the NICs as results of the commands * Asynchronous event notifications (AENs), sent asynchronously by the NICs and equivalently to interrupts, upon the occurrence of the specified event When the NC-SI is used over RBT, standard Ethernet framing is used for all traffic types. Control traffic is identified by using an
EtherType EtherType is a two- octet field in an Ethernet frame. It is used to indicate which protocol is encapsulated in the payload of the frame and is used at the receiving end by the data link layer to determine how the payload is processed. The same ...
of 0x88F8. When the NC-SI is used in conjunction with MCTP, MCTP provides the packetization methodology and traffic type identification.


See also

* Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) * Platform Management Components Intercommunication (PMCI)


References


External links


DMTF Homepage

NC-SI Specification rev 1.1.0

NC-SI over MCTP Binding Specification rev 1.2.2
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nc-Si DMTF standards Out-of-band management