Autonegotiation – Either you love it or you hate it but pretty much everyone has an opinion on it. I was going to write something more lengthy at first but decided a blog was the wrong place.
Autonegotiation works by sending eletrical pulses. In 10Base-T these are called Normal Link Pulses (NLP). They are sent every 16th ms with a tolerance of 8 ms. They are only sent when the Network Interface Card (NIC) is not receiving or sending traffic. They look like this:
In the fast Ethernet standard (802.3u) these are called Fast Link Pulses (FLP) and they look like this:
These electrical pulses lets us determine the speed and duplex mode that is available in autonegotiation. The priority for choosing a speed and duplex mode goes like this:
- 1000Base-T – Full duplex
- 1000Base-T – Half duplex
- 100Base-T2 – Full duplex
- 100Base-TX – Full duplex
- 100Base-T2 – Half duplex
- 100Base-T4
- 100Base-TX – Half duplex
- 10BaseT – Full duplex
- 10BaseT – Half duplex
If one side is set to auto and the other side hardcoded parallell detection kicks in. Parallell detection can determine the speed by looking at the format of the electrical pulses it is receiving from its link partner. Duplex can’t be detected so that will default to half duplex. This is why we sometimes see links with 100/half duplex. If one side is auto and the other 100/full the auto side will be set to 100/half.
Half duplex is of course very bad, it leads to frame errors, dropped packets and late collisions.
Ofc hard-coded duplex and speed settings could mess things up a bit :).
Found a few exapmples at work.. With AS400 for example 😉
Nice blog btw, will subscribe to it :).