My Station TCAM

[visitor68]

Does anyone know exactly what "My Station TCAM" is?

[Mark Malone]

Not sure about My Station but TCAM here is a good explanation-------TCAM is commonly found in networking equipment, such as high-performance routers and switches, to increase the speed of route look-up, packet classification, packet forwarding and access control list-based commands.

[Rajeshkumar Gatti]

Specific to certain platforms, "my station TCAM" is a equivalent to a hardware mac table. One can poll this TCAM to check if the software (show mac address) and its corresponding hardware entries for a mac address is consistent.

Any specific reason to know about this information as it is used generally by TAC for platform level debugging.

-Raj

[visitor68]

Thanks, Gatti...just trying to get a more in-depth understanding of internal switch architecture...sometimes the superficial stuff that we are 'allowed" to know beggars more detail.

Is the term "My Station TCAM" a Cisco term...Broadcom...etc...who? What command can be executed to extract data from it.

[Rajeshkumar Gatti · Accepted solution]

Accessing the broadcom shell and executing commands should be left to the TAC engineers. Reason is that these commands are not very intuitive and you cannot parse it out.

Broadcom shell config guide

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus9000/sw/6-x/programmability/guide/b_Cisco_Nexus_9000_Series_NX-OS_Programmability_Guide/b_Cisco_Nexus_9000_Series_NX-OS_Programmability_Guide_chapter_0101.html#concept_0A11E0DF67DE4F749CC544ABD34861EC

Guidelines and Limitations

Using the Broadcom Shell has the following guideline and limitation:

• You can access and read information from the T2 ASICs without any limitations. However, Cisco does not recommend that you change the settings of the T2 configuration. Use caution when accessing the Broadcom Shell.

Specific to your question here is how I can do it on the C9396PX

9396-A# sh mac address-table
Legend:
        * - primary entry, G - Gateway MAC, (R) - Routed MAC, O - Overlay MAC
        age - seconds since last seen,+ - primary entry using vPC Peer-Link,
        (T) - True, (F) - False
   VLAN     MAC Address      Type      age     Secure NTFY Ports
---------+-----------------+--------+---------+------+----+------------------
G    -     f40f.1b6f.926f   static   -         F      F    sup-eth1(R)

9396-A# bcm-shell mod 1
Warning: BCM shell access should be used with caution
Entering bcm shell on module 1
Available Unit Numbers: 0

bcm-shell.0> dump chg MY_STATION_TCAM
MY_STATION_TCAM.ipipe0[511]: <VALID=1,MASK=0xffffffffffff,MAC_ADDR_MASK=0xffffffffffff,MAC_ADDR=0xf40f1b6f926f,KEY=0xf40f1b6f926f,IPV6_TERMINATION_ALLOWED=1,IPV4_TERMINATION_ALLOWED=1,DATA=0x38,ARP_RARP_TERMINATION_ALLOWED=1>
bcm-shell.0> exit

Hope this helps.

-Raj

[visitor68]

Thank you!!!