Solarflare TCPDirect Software Extension

Solarflare’s Universal Kernel Bypass (UKB) TCPDirect Application Accelerator software extension is a user-space technology that provides kernel bypass for TCP and UDP based applications. TCPDirect minimizes network stack overhead, resulting in the absolutely lowest possible latency between applications and the network. TCPDirect has its own zero-copy user-space API offering conceptually similar semantics to a subset of the BSD sockets API and so can co-exist with Onload within the same application. The TCPDirect software extension is available for Solarflare 8000 Series XtremeScale network adapters.

• TCP and UDP acceleration including multicast
• Lowest application-to-application latency in a fully featured RFC-compliant stack
• Up to 3 million messages per second on a single CPU core
• Provides a new lightweight TCP/IP stack that exposes an API architected and dedicated for minimal latency

• TCPDirect supports multithreading
• Applications can parallelize and partition network access via multiple TCPDirect stack instances, typically one per thread, which are created explicitly
• TCP and UDP sockets have their own set of API calls
• Both passive (listening) and active (connecting) TCP sockets are supported
• Sockets may be addressed individually or via a multiplexer (similar to epoll)
• All data-path calls are non-blocking to give the application total control
• Latency : 20ns

• SF-117079