I-Tech Specific Notes - Viavi Xgig User Manual

Chapter 18, Converting Files from Other Platforms
To greatly speed up conversion and analysis time by Expert, the converter, by default, does not
convert SATA_HOLD, SATA_HOLDA, SATA_R_IP, SATA_CONT, or SATA_SYNC primitives.
These primitives are not typically utilized by Expert, other than for a couple of very subtle
performance metrics and the trade-off is MUCH faster trace conversion and processing time by
Expert and TraceView. If you find it important to see these primitives in the converted trace, utilize
the converter from the command line (see below) with the /I switch to re-enable the conversion of
these.
The converter also, by default, truncates the frames down to 16 words per frame. The extra data is
not utilized by Expert for the most part, and requires significant amounts of overhead/time to
process, thus is dropped in the conversion process. If you find it important to see all of the frame
data in the converted trace, utilize the converter from the command line (see below) with the /T0
switch to re-enable the full frame conversion without truncation.
TraceView will show COMSAS, COMINIT, COMWAKE, COMRESET and D.C. Idle events as
"simulated events" with meaningless 8b data values. These items will be visible and decoded.
However, they will be represented as K-character events.
The converter utility can be run as a stand-alone executable from a CMD window and supports
many options and additional features that are not available when converting from the GUI
application. The executable is called IOConverter.exe and exists in the program installation
directory (normally C:\Program Files\ViaviViavi\Xgig Analyzer). For detailed information on the
IOConverter, run IOConverter.exe /h from the command line.

I-Tech specific notes

The I-Tech analyzer provides a mechanism for truncating frames in the capture to a user specified
number of bytes. Use of this option causes primitives within frames to be discarded automatically,
thus risking the potential of missing critical primitives such as R_RDY, ACK, etc. It also captures
in such a fashion that the conversion process would be unable to determine an accurate length of
the payload data in frames, which is critical to Expert and cannot be overlooked. Therefore,
conversion of SAS/SATA captures with truncated frames within them is disallowed.
I-Tech captures of OOB sequences work very differently than Bus Doctor captures of the same
sequences. The I-Tech analyzer captures the OOB bursts and does not mark a record for the
completed or failed OOB sequence. To accommodate this, the converter only inserts completed
OOB summary events into the Xgig capture - the individual OOB events will not be shown.
In I-Tech, code violations and disparity errors do not store the 10b data (for Fibre Channel or SAS/
SATA capture formats) and error bytes are represented by a value of XX in the I-Tech viewer, but
have a valid data value of 0x23 behind them. Converted disparity errors and code violations will
show the error, but will have a hex value of 0x23 in the byte of the error, since the 10b data is not
present.
The I-Tech analyzer does not store information on the running disparity of the captured data, so
the resulting display of 10b data in Xgig will have incorrect running disparity values.
I-Tech traces store full information on the capture data rate accurately, so the /R switch from the
command line is not necessary. The converter will automatically set the correct capture rates in the
trace.
398
Converting I-Tech Files
Xgig Analyzer User's Guide