Re: zero copy and early demultiplex on Alteon gigabit ethernet ca rds

[Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> You can look at http://oss.sgi.com/projects/stp to get
> more information regarding ST.

Thanks for the pointer. It's about time we had some new
protocols... 
 
> I'm particularly impressed by the UDP payload throughput
> of 956Mb/s for 1480 bytes. In my experience I found the
> alteon firmware loop times to be closer to 12-16us for
> 1500byte frames. Did you guys do the firmware from scratch?

We completely re-wrote the send and receive path.
 
> The second question I had was: how easy/difficult is to run
> a different protocol (stack) using the modified firmware
> by you guys.

Easy. The firmware is entirely agnostic as to the protocol being
used -- all the demuxing and packet validation is done with a
generic packet filtering mechanism.

Ian