"Leonid Grossman" <Leonid.Grossman at neterion.com> writes: > I did not mean kernel bypass, just L2 hw channels that for > all practical purposes act as separate NICs - > different MAC addresses, no blocking, independent reset, etc. Yes. Nearly all of what you need for safe kernel bypass. >> In the worst case I might need someone to go as far as the >> Grand Unified Lookup to remove all of the overheads. Except >> for distributing the work load more evenly across the machine >> with separate interrupts and the like I see no need for >> separate hardware channels to make things go fast for my needs. >> >> Despite the title of this thread there is no virtualization >> or emulation of the hardware involved. Just enhancements to >> the existing hardware abstractions. > > Right, I was just trying to say that IOV support (likely, from multiple > vendors since > virtualization is expected to be widely used) would provide an option to > export multiple > independent L2 interfaces from a single NIC - even if only a subset of > IOV functionality would be used in this case. Agreed, and I think I understood that. My basic point was that it doesn't look to me like I need the hardware support, just that I can use it when it is there. The core advantage I see of the multiple queues, is in being able to split the processing of network traffic and interrupts among multiple cores. Eric
