Aspects of a switch fabric end-to-end congestion avoidance mechanism are presented. Aspects of a system for end-to-end congestion avoidance in a switch fabric may include at least one circuit that enables reception of a congestion notification message that specifies a traffic flow identifier. The circuitry may enable increase or decrease of a current rate for transmission of data link layer (DLL) protocol data units (PDU) associated with the specified traffic flow identifier as a response to the reception of the congestion notification message.