4. Exablaze support

4.1. Prerequisites

We expect you to have installed the ExaNIC drivers (v. 1.7 or later) and loaded the drivers.

4.2. Usage

Using the exanic-config tool, you can see how the NIC has been mapped by Linux to the device name

exanic-config
Device exanic0:
  Hardware type: ExaNIC X10
  Board ID: 0x00
  Temperature: 50.4 C   VCCint: 0.94 V   VCCaux: 1.79 V
  Function: network interface
  Firmware date: 20160420 (Wed Apr 20 00:34:19 2016)
  Port 0:
    Interface: enp6s0
    Port speed: 10000 Mbps
    Port status: enabled, SFP present, signal detected, link active
    MAC filters: 64  IP filters: 128
    Promiscuous mode: off
    Bypass-only mode: off
    MAC address: 64:3f:5f:01:2f:6a
    RX packets: 2151761082  ignored: 2048817419  error: 0  dropped: 0
    TX packets: 293756031
  Port 1:
    Interface: enp6s0d1
    Port speed: 10000 Mbps
    Port status: enabled, SFP present, signal detected, link active
    MAC filters: 64  IP filters: 128
    Promiscuous mode: off
    Bypass-only mode: off
    MAC address: 64:3f:5f:01:2f:6b
    RX packets: 27  ignored: 0  error: 0  dropped: 0
    TX packets: 8

ifconfig enp6s0
enp6s0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 64:3f:5f:01:2f:6a
          inet6 addr: fe80::663f:5fff:fe01:2f6a/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:102941282 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:6588303265 (6.5 GB)  TX bytes:648 (648.0 B)

ifconfig enp6s0d1
enp6s0d1  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 64:3f:5f:01:2f:6b
          inet6 addr: fe80::663f:5fff:fe01:2f6b/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:27 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:2290 (2.2 KB)  TX bytes:648 (648.0 B)

You can now start the PF_RING apps prepending “exanic:” to the interface name. Example:

pfsend -i exanic:enp6s0

pfcount -i exanic:enp6s0@1

Where @1 means connect the application to RSS queue 1

4.3. Hardware Filtering

Exablaze NICs support (limited, e.g. IPv6 is not supported) hardware filtering out of the box. Thanks to nBPF we convert BPF expressions to hardware filters. This feature is supported transparently, and thus all PF_RING/libpcap-over-PF_RING can benefit from it.

Example:

pfcount -i exanic:enp6s0d4 -f "udp and port 3001"

When a BPF filter cannot be mapped 1:1 to a hardware filter, software packet filtering will take place to guarantee that the specified filter is enforced.