1. Adapters Comparison Table

Below you can find a comparison table with all network adapters natively supported by PF_RING.

This table helps you understanding what features they provide and what performance you can expect when using a given NIC with PF_RING. ntop does not endorse any manufacturer, so this page is designed to help the reader to select the best NIC for its needs.

Fiberblaze

Intel

NVIDIA

Napatech

Status

Supported

Supported

Supported

Supported

Max Port Speed (Gbit)

100

100

100

100

On-board Memory (1)

Yes

No

No

Yes

Hardware Filtering

Yes

Yes

Yes

Hardware Port Merge

Yes

No

No

Yes

Hardware Timestamps

Yes

Yes

Yes

Pcap Chunk Mode Support (2)

Yes

No

No

Yes

Optimized for nProbe

Yes

Yes

Yes

nProbe Cento 100Gbit

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

n2disk 1 x 10Gbit Line Rate

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

n2disk 2 x 10Gbit Line Rate

Yes

No

Yes

n2disk 100Gbit Line Rate

Yes

No

No

Yes

Note:

  1. On-board memory helps mitigating traffic spikes/bursts and reduces the probability of packet loss during capture.

  2. Pcap chunk mode allows the NIC to deliver many packets in one block to the application, instead of packet-by-packet. Thanks to chunk mode, the application (in particular n2disk) can significantly reduce the CPU load when dumping packets to disk. Please note that in case of index creation while dumping packets, n2disk still needs to iterate packets; even in this case chunk mode can help as it is usually more efficient than packet mode.

  3. This needs to be tested or it is not applicable due to feature limitation.

  4. Supported on some adapters