Last year we have introduced PF_RING DNA for implementing 0% CPU receive/transmission on commodity 1/10 Gbit network adapters. We considered DNA as a starting point, as it implemented high-speed RX/TX that was enough for most, but not all of you. This is because commodity adapters do not feature advanced packet balancing techniques as they rely [...]

Over the past couple of weeks we have further improved the DNA performance, and thus we have decided to test its performance. In order to do reproducible measurements we decided to adopt the benchmark specified in RFC 2544. You can find the complete test details and results on this document: DNA_ip_forward_RFC2544.

As you can [...]

For years networking companies have used the buzzword zero-copy to qualify those hardware/software solutions that allow applications to play with packets without the need to copy them at all. Zero-copy needs DMA (Direct Memory Access) for operating so that applications do not get a (shallow) copy of packets but they actually get the pointer [...]

In network monitoring it is very common to use taps for duplicating network traffic (RX and TX directions).

Taps are important as they allow network probes to operate passively without interfering with network operations. The two traffic directions (A to B and B to A) are plugged into two network ports of the [...]

In the past months I have received a few emails about how to position DNA with respect to netmap. To many people they look like two competing solutions, but in reality they are just two solutions to the same problem. Yesterday I had a nice meeting with Luigi Rizzo, the author of netmap.