Packet Blaster
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All Gen2+ FMADIO devices have a built in packet blaster / Layer 2 packet generator. This allows a single system to be entirely self contained for unit and system testing. In addition FMADIO devices can also load test network devices such as switching and firewalls, checking for physical layer links and measuring network path latency.
Packet blaster is a layer 2 (Ethernet level) packet generator that runs at full line rate @ 64B to 9218 Jumbo sized packets. Generation is performed entirely on the FPGA Capture card thus up to full 100Gbps @ 64B 148Mpps packets can be generated without generation variance. Packet generation and capture can run simultaneously, thus verification the capture device is operating correctly is achieved.
The payload of each packet is a per physical port MAC Address followed by a 32bit incrementally increasing sequence number. This sequence number is used later post capture to ensure data of all packets has been captured correctly without error. An example packet is shown in Wireshark below.
In the above wireshark picture, you can see 2 different MAC address 11:11:11:11:11:11 (Physical Port 1) and 22:22:22:22:22 (Physical Port 2). The payload is a 32bit little endian sequence numbers
This sequence number and MAC address allow the analysis software to not only check the total number of packets captured by the device, but also check every byte of the payload has been captured without error. As the analysis software knows exactly what the packet payload data should be via the sequence number.
Packet blaster is operated only by the CLI interface, each FMAD SKU has a slightly different operation
Example operation, generate 1 billion 64B packets on a single 100G port at full line rate
Payload data verification on the device is achieved by "linux-cat-ing" a capture down a linux pipe to the builtin utility capinfos2. The syntax looks as follows
