4 ms·

Sure, using hardware-accelerated packet routing for accelerating network protocols (e.g. Cavium SoCs).

• shaklee3 9y ago
  He's referring to dpdk and the likes. Not Hardware off loads such as cavium or other special chips.
  • faragon 9y ago
    Ok, thank you.
  • jabl 9y ago
    Not really dpdk either, though I suppose there are similarities (Disclaimer: I know very little about dpdk). Think Infiniband (IB), not ethernet. Demanding applications such as MPI libraries or Lustre are written directly against the IB verbs interface, not TCP/IP with the sockets API. And yes, IB is designed such that the NIC HW can offload quite a lot, and the rest is indeed done in userspace without kernel involvement in the hot paths. That being said, it's possible to run more or less the IB protocol stack on ethernet hardware, it's called ROCE (RDMA over converged ethernet). Somewhat amazingly, latency is actually quite competitive with IB.
    • shaklee3 9y ago
      He mentioned hardware-accelerated packet routing. RoCE is not a routing protocol -- it's a UDP packet using IB verbs to DMA directly to hardware on the PCIe bus and bypass the processor. But yes, RoCE is a really interesting protocol and seems to have won the RoCE versus iWarp war.