Field Notice: FN - 63866 - Catalyst 6500 Series Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers TCAM Exhaustion - Configuration Change Might Be Required
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August 20, 2014
NOTICE:
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Revision History
Revision Date Comment
Products Affected
Problem Description
On August 8, 2014, the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) Report, which provides statistics on the global Internet routing table, reported that the global Internet routing table had passed 512,000 routes for the first time in Internet history. When the total number of IPv4 routes exceeds 512,000 on a Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switch or Cisco 7600 Series routers that run Supervisor 720 (Sup720) engines, the hardware Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) might report an exception that results in network instability.
Background
All of the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switches and Cisco 7600 Series routers with Sup720 engines that operate in 3BXL or 3CXL mode are configured in order to program only 512,000 IPv4 routes in the hardware TCAM by default.
Problem Symptoms
On the Catalyst 6500 and Cisco 7600 Series platforms, all of the IPv4/IPv6/MPLS routing information is stored in special high-speed memory called Forwarding Information Base (FIB) TCAM.
When a route is programmed into the Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) table in the main memory (DRAM), a copy of that route is stored in the hardware FIB TCAM on the Supervisor Policy Feature Card (PFC), as well as any Distributed Forwarding Card (DFC) on the modules.
By default, these platforms are configured as shown here:
IPv4 + MPLS - 512k (default)
IPv6 + IP Multicast - 256k (default)When the number of IPv4 + MPLS routes exceed 512,000, the system experiences TCAM exception and might report:
%MLSCEF-DFC4-7-FIB_EXCEPTION: FIB TCAM exception, Some entries will be
software switched
%MLSCEF-SP-7-FIB_EXCEPTION: FIB TCAM exception, Some entries will be
software switchedIt is important to be aware that the aforementioned errors are reported only once when the TCAM limit is exceeded. Even if the total number of routes withdraw below the configured limit, the switch remains in the exception state until it is cleared:
Catalyst6509#show mls cef exception status
Current IPv4 FIB exception state = TRUE
Current IPv6 FIB exception state = FALSE
Current MPLS FIB exception state = FALSEAs a result of this TCAM exception condition, connectivity is affected, which might result in elevated CPU usage due to the software switching.
Workaround/Solution
Refer to the CAT 6500 and 7600 Series Routers and Switches TCAM Allocation Adjustment Procedures document on Cisco.com for more details about this issue and the associated workaround/solution.
For More Information
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