OAM (operations, administration, and maintenance) is a general term used to describe the processes, activities, tools, standards, etc. involved with operation, administration, and maintenance of any system. PING and ARP are two examples of OAM packets. The main CPU is responsible for building the OAM packets and then passing them to the DS34T108. The DS34T108 will subsequently send these OAM packets to the Ethernet interface. The HAL driver for the DS34T108 provides an API interface to send OAM packets. The method for this API in 'AsicHal' class is: SendPacket(byte * i_PktHandle, byte *i_PktBuffer, word i_PktLen, byte *i_SendParams) where: i_PktHandle 0 i_PktBuffer A pointer to the OAM packet that needs to be built before a call is made to this method i_PktLen Size in bytes of the OAM packet i_SendParams Miscellaneous parameters that also ne