This technical report is intended to document interoperability behavior for Fabric elements (i.e., E_Port, F_Port, FL_Port). The scope of this technical report is to include a wide range of issues such as link initialization, error detection, error recovery, Fabric operation, management capabilities, and zoning.

This technical report is intended to serve as an implementation guide, the primary objective of which is to maximize the likelihood of interoperability between conforming implementations. This technical report prohibits or requires some features that are in the referenced ANSI INCITS standards.

A second objective of this technical report is to simplify implementations and their associated documentation, testing, and support requirements. As a result there may be some optional features of the referenced ANSI INCITS standards that are not mutually exclusive, but are prohibited or required for the purpose of this simplification. Features that some but not all of the referenced ANSI INCITS standards require for compliance may be optional in this technical report. Each specification of such an optional feature in this technical report identifies the referenced ANSI INCITS standards for which the feature is required.

Internal characteristics of conformant implementations are not defined by this technical report. This technical report incorporates features from the standards and technical reports described in clause 2.