The present invention relates to Ethernet switches and switching, and more particularly, this invention relates to providing I2C bus over Ethernet.
A significant portion of network switches have various devices which utilize I2C bus as an interface to a local host external of the network switch or a local processor of the network switch, such as a central processing unit (CPU). Devices which communicate using an I2C bus will be referred to throughout this document as I2C bus devices. These I2C bus devices are typically controlled by the local processor over the I2C bus of the network switch. Some typical I2C bus devices include, but are not limited to, fan controllers, power supply units, various thermal gauges, serial electrically erasable programmable read only memory (SEEPROM) memories of various subunits, etc. In cell-based distributed fabric protocol (cDFP) and/or Ethernet-based distributed fabric protocol (eDFP) scaled out systems (referred to herein collectively as DFP systems), there are multiple individual system members which, in order to function properly, need to be controlled by the system master in real time. However, in conventional distributed systems or clusters, there is no way to provide real-time I2C bus over Ethernet.