Identifying the Ports

The chassis is organized by slots, fabric ports, PREs or F-chips, and physical ports. The number of F-Chips and physical ports varies according to the module type. This information helps you distribute the workload evenly among resources and identify possible choke points:

• Every Fabric port can manage up to 4 F-Chips
• Slot 1 has 1 Fabric port only
• Slots 2-7 (P580) and Slots 2-17 (P882) have 2 Fabric ports per slot
• The Supervisor has 1 F-chip (FORE)
• The 8-port GigE has 8 F-Chips (4 per Fabric port)
• The 4-port GigE has 4 F-Chips (2 per Fabric port)
• The 24-port Ethernet modules (copper or fiber) have 2 F-Chips (1 per Fabric port). Physical Ports 1-12 correspond with F-Chip 1, and Physical Ports 13-24 correspond with F-Chip 2.
• The 48-port Ethernet has 4 F-Chips (2 per Fabric port) with the following Physical Port to F-Chip correspondence: ports 1-12: F-Chip 1, ports 13-24: F-Chip 2, ports 25-36: F-Chip 3, ports 37-48: F-Chip 4.

Fabric ports are numbered regardless of whether other slots are empty or full.

F-Chips numbers are associated with their respective Fabric ports. To locate the Fabric port and F-Chip for a physical port, you must know the media type and slot.

For example, Physical port 20 on a 24-port Ethernet module that is in slot 4 of the chassis is identified by Fabric Port 7 and F-Chip 2. This will be displayed as Chip 7/2. These absolute addresses are not affected by the placement or type of other modules.

Table�99 shows the slots, fabric ports, PREs or F-chips, and physical ports of the switch.