SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR IMPLEMENTING ERROR DETECTION AND RECOVERY IN A SYSTEM AREA NETWORK

摘要

A system and method for facilitating both in-order and out-of-order packet reception in a SAN includes requestor and responder nodes, coupled by a plurality of paths, that maintain the good and bad status of each path and also maintain local copies of a message sequence number. If an error occurs for a transaction over a given path, the requestor informs the responder, over a good path, that the given path has failed and both nodes update their path status to indicate that the given path is bad. A barrier transaction is used by the requestor to determine whether the error is transient or permanent, and, if the error is transient, the requestor retries the transaction.