This technical note describes the use of flow control methods with Systran FibreXtreme and LinkXchange products. Flow control is the process in which the receiver can control the transmitter output to match its own receive rate.
Systran FibreXtreme products provide a flow control mechanism that should be enabled in almost every application, even when the data source cannot be stopped.
In general, there are two basic arguments for using flow control:
- It is difficult to recover under software control from multiple errors caused by FIFO overflows.
- It is always better to drop the data at the sending source (as opposed to the receiving destination) if the system experiences a temporary overload. If bad data makes it to the receiver, this bad data must still be read out of the receiver’s RX FIFO and handled at the application level.