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Flow control

Flow control enables you to manage the flow of frames between two directly connected link-partners. Flow control can reduce or eliminate dropped packets due to overrun.

To achieve flow control, you can specify a flow control option that causes packets called Pause frames to be used as needed. For example, link-partner A sends a Pause On frame to link-partner B when its receive buffers are nearly full. Link-partner B suspends transmission until it receives a Pause Off frame from link-partner A or a specified timeout threshold is reached.