Citation :
The Physical Coding Sublayer is responsible for delimiting the frames, and sending them up to the MAC layer.
In Gigabit Ethernet, for example, the 8B/10B encoding scheme uses a 10 bit codegroup to encode an 8-bit byte. The extra two bits tell whether a byte is control information or data. Control information can be Configuration, Start_of_packet, End_of_packet, IDLE, Carrier_extend, Error_propagation.
That is how a NIC knows where a frame start and ends. This also means that the length of the frame is not known before it has fully decoded, analogous to a NULL-terminated string in C.
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