Chapter 12. Transparent Board Management

Table of Contents

1. Installation
2. Diagnostic
3. Firmware upgrade

Dolphin eXpressWare 5.18.0 and newer includes new functionality to manage and monitor Dolphins transparent PCIe Host and Target cards and links. This is referenced as Transparent Board Management software.

Most PCIe chipsets and professional adapter cards will have functionality for advanced status logging. This typically includes detailed PCIe link status and transaction reports (including retriable and fatal PCIe errors), performance counters, board power supply health and status, chip and environmental temperatures. Without specialized software, this information is hard to extract.

The PCIe Transparent Board Management software enables users to extract this information and verify a healthy operational condition and link status. This can be done both for evaluating and tuning new designs as well as for monitoring production systems to trigger pro-active maintenance (replace a cable that may cause problems in the future).