This feature support is to provide additional hardware diagnostic functionality for physical ports on boards. This feature will enable the user to determine if there are any issues in the physical port at the MAC and the PHY layer.

To achieve this functionality, the Ethernet interfaces can be configured as the loopback interfaces. Looping back the packets are possible either at MAC layer or at PHY layer. Also packets can be looped either from Egress to Ingress or Ingress to Egress. On enabling this feature, if all the TX packets are looped back to RX, it indicates there is no issue with the hardware at the particular layer configured, either MAC or PHY.