What do Coil and Pinnacle refer to on a Cat 65xx?

We're working on some ASIC issues on a Catalyst 6509, and are curious
about what "Coil" and "Pinnacle" are referring to.

I really doubt they are talking about an actual coil... is it an
acronym for something?

Thanks!

 

Chip names. Pinnacle is responsible for queuing and doing packet
rewrites as required. It also couples to the D-bus and R-bus. The
former is used for data xfer and the latter sorta/kinda plays traffic
cop.

Coil handles 12 Fa ports at a time and connects to the pinnacle.

There are various commands (hidden/maintenance mode commands) that can
query these chips directly. For example, we recently ran into a bug
with hybrid (CatOS 6.3.3) where the Polaris chip - responsible for
maintaining the forwarding base (FIB) - got confused. It actually had
10 or so in there when only two were valid. Hence frames were getting
blackholed.



--

hsb

"Somehow I imagined this experience would be more rewarding" Calvin
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