I wouldn't call this obscure by any means. You'll find Ethernet flow control enabled on just about every datacenter network, especially those that have a combined network and storage fabric.
The mechanism here Pause is an abomination which should never be enabled.
I don't think he had his TV in a datacenter.
From the article:
> After some clever deductive reasoning, a.k.a randomly unplugging cables from the router, I determined that my TV was sending these mystery frames (yes, my TV — I have a Sony X805D Android TV).
> The mechanism here Pause is an abomination which should never be enabled.
What? You can't be serious, I think you have no idea what that would cause in almost every ethernet network. Let me tell you: a lot of packet loss that messes with TCP streams etc.
L2 pause frames are used by practically all of the ethernet devices, and for a really good reason. Pause frames are a perfectly good way to do flow control in most networks. Not having them means a lot of lost frames and generic pain in most networks... except of course datacenters.
Sure, it's not a standard. But it's good enough for 99.9% of use cases. Just maybe not in datacenter.
Or is that just the Chrome team following the letter and the spirit of the law? "if they want a PAUSE by God they'll get one..."
Just speculating, but the stop/start oscillation in traffic rate could cause code running in chrome, such as a video codec, to exercise parts of its re-buffering code in a way that exposes a bug.