Introducing nBPF: line-rate hardware packet filtering (yes Wireshark at 100G is possible)
Modern network adapters such as Exablaze, Napatech and Silicom’s Intel FM10K, support hardware filters. Unfortunately every company has its own way to set filters, no unified API, and no support of any BPF-like filters. Most of the network monitoring community instead is used to set filters using BPF and thus powerful hardware filtering is present but unused. This has been the driving force for developing nBPF (ntop BPF). We have realized that most of the times filters include IP, port and protocol, that are exactly the features that hardware-based filters …