Ethernet frame types and the EtherType field

Frames are the format of data packets on the wire. Note that a frame viewed on the actual physical hardware would show start bits, sometimes called the preamble, and the trailing Frame Check Sequence. These are required by all physical hardware and is seen in all four following frame types. They are not displayed by packet sniffing software because these bits are removed by the Ethernet adapter before being passed on to the network protocol stack software.

There are several types of Ethernet frames:

• The Ethernet Version 2 or Ethernet II frame, the so-called DIX frame (named after DEC, Intel, and Xerox); this is the most common today, as it is often used directly by the Internet Protocol.
• Novell's non-standard variation of IEEE 802.3 ("raw 802.3 frame") without an IEEE 802.2 LLC header.
• IEEE 802.2 LLC frame
• IEEE 802.2 LLC/SNAP frame

In addition, Ethernet frames may optionally contain a IEEE 802.1Q tag to identify what VLAN it belongs to and its IEEE 802.1p priority (quality of service). This doubles the potential number of frame types.

The different frame types have different formats and MTU values, but can coexist on the same physical medium.

Versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the Digital/Intel/Xerox (DIX) Ethernet specification have a 16-bit sub-protocol label field called the EtherType. The original IEEE 802.3 Ethernet specification replaced that with a 16-bit length field, with the MAC header followed by an IEEE 802.2 logical link control (LLC) header; the maximum length of a packet was 1500 bytes. The two formats were eventually unified by the convention that values of that field between 0 and 1500 indicated the use of the original 802.3 Ethernet format with a length field, while values of 1536 decimal (0600 hexadecimal) and greater indicated the use of the DIX frame format with an EtherType sub-protocol identifier.^[4] This convention allows software to determine whether a frame is an Ethernet II frame or an IEEE 802.3 frame, allowing the coexistence of both standards on the same physical medium. See also Jumbo Frames.

By examining the 802.2 LLC header, it is possible to determine whether it is followed by a SNAP (subnetwork access protocol) header. Some protocols, particularly those designed for the OSI networking stack, operate directly on top of 802.2 LLC, which provides both datagram and connection-oriented network services. The LLC header includes two additional eight-bit address fields, called service access points or SAPs in OSI terminology; when both source and destination SAP are set to the value 0xAA, the SNAP service is requested. The SNAP header allows EtherType values to be used with all IEEE 802 protocols, as well as supporting private protocol ID spaces. In IEEE 802.3x-1997, the IEEE Ethernet standard was changed to explicitly allow the use of the 16-bit field after the MAC addresses to be used as a length field or a type field.

Novell's "raw" 802.3 frame format was based on early IEEE 802.3 work. Novell used this as a starting point to create the first implementation of its own IPX Network Protocol over Ethernet. They did not use any LLC header but started the IPX packet directly after the length field. This does not conform to the IEEE 802.3 standard, but since IPX has always FF at the first two bytes (while in IEEE 802.2 LLC that pattern is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely), in practice this mostly coexists on the wire with other Ethernet implementations, with the notable exception of some early forms of DECnet which got confused by this.

Novell NetWare used this frame type by default until the mid nineties, and since Netware was very widespread back then, while IP was not, at some point in time most of the world's Ethernet traffic ran over "raw" 802.3 carrying IPX. Since Netware 4.10 Netware now defaults to IEEE 802.2 with LLC (Netware Frame Type Ethernet_802.2) when using IPX. (See "Ethernet Framing" in References for details.)

Mac OS uses 802.2/SNAP framing for the AppleTalk V2 protocol suite on Ethernet ("EtherTalk") and Ethernet II framing for TCP/IP.

The 802.2 variants of Ethernet are not in widespread use on common networks currently, with the exception of large corporate Netware installations that have not yet migrated to Netware over IP. In the past, many corporate networks supported 802.2 Ethernet to support transparent translating bridges between Ethernet and IEEE 802.5 Token Ring or FDDI networks. The most common framing type used today is Ethernet Version 2, as it is used by most Internet Protocol-based networks, with its EtherType set to 0x0800 for IPv4 and 0x86DD for IPv6.

There exists an Internet standard for encapsulating IP version 4 traffic in IEEE 802.2 frames with LLC/SNAP headers.^[5] It is almost never implemented on Ethernet (although it is used on FDDI and on token ring, IEEE 802.11, and other IEEE 802 networks). IP traffic can not be encapsulated in IEEE 802.2 LLC frames without SNAP because, although there is an LLC protocol type for IP, there is no LLC protocol type for ARP. IP Version 6 can also be transmitted over Ethernet using IEEE 802.2 with LLC/SNAP, but, again, that's almost never used (although LLC/SNAP encapsulation of IPv6 is used on IEEE 802 networks).

The IEEE 802.1Q tag, if present, is placed between the Source Address and the EtherType or Length fields. The first two bytes of the tag are the Tag Protocol Identifier (TPID) value of 0x8100. This is located in the same place as the EtherType/Length field in untagged frames, so an EtherType value of 0x8100 means the frame is tagged, and the true EtherType/Length is located after the tag. The TPID is followed by two bytes containing the Tag Control Information (TCI) (the IEEE 802.1p priority (quality of service) and VLAN id). The tag is followed by the rest of the frame, using one of the types described above.