Packet format

A physical Ethernet packet will look like this:

As the Ethernet hardware filters the preamble, it is not given to Wireshark or any other application. Most Ethernet interfaces also either don‘t supply the FCS to Wireshark or other applications, or aren‘t configured by their driver to do so; therefore, Wireshark will typically only be given the green fields, although on some platforms, with some interfaces, the FCS will be supplied on incoming packets.

Allowed Packet Lengths

Ethernet packets with less than the minimum 64 bytes for an Ethernet packet (header + user data + FCS) are padded to 64 bytes, which means that if there‘s less than 64-(14+4) = 46 bytes of user data, extra padding data is added to the packet.