Accelerating netfilter with hardware offload, part 1 [LWN.net]
DRANK

Please consider subscribing to LWNSubscriptions are the lifeblood of LWN.net. If you appreciate this content and would like to see more of it, your subscription will help to ensure that LWN continues to thrive. Please visit this page to join up and keep LWN on the net.January 14, 2020This article was contributed by Marta RybczyńskaSupporting network protocols at high speeds in pure software is getting increasingly difficult, with 25-100Gb/s interfaces available now and 200-400Gb/s starting to show up. Packet processing at 100Gb/s must happen in 200 cycles or less, which does not leave much room for processing at the operating-system level. Fortunately some operations can be performed by hardware, including checksum verification and offloading parts of the packet send and receive paths.As modern hardware adds more functionality, new options are becoming available. The 5.3 kernel includes a patch set from Pablo Neira Ayuso that added support for offloading some packet filtering with ne…

lwn.net
Related Topics: