[c-nsp] Unsupported SFP on Cisco 2960

[Nick Hilliard]

On 25/07/2012 19:17, Jared Mauch wrote:
> You will only save money. SFP is a standard media just like USB ports. 

It is a standard medium, just like e.g. SATA or SCSI is a standard medium.
 It's a hardware interface mechanism and is subject to driver bugs,
interface protocol ambiguities, hardware peculiarities and all that.  In
moment of frustration about why vendors decline to support third party
SFPs, I occasionally browse the OSS source code to various hardware drivers
to get some sort of understanding of the quirks and general messing around
that a low-level driver of this form would need to be able to handle
gracefully.

e.g.:

> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/ixgbe/ixgbe.c?annotate=1.53.2.6
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/ixgbe/ixgbe_phy.c?annotate=1.11.2.3

Having said that, I am a happy user of third party transceivers for all my
optical requirements.  Will happily give the vendor first refusal on any
third party quotation I get, but it's an offer that they generally don't
take up.

Nick