Quickly Testing NIC and Driver Interactions by a Software-based NIC
Ryusei Shiiba, Ryo Nakamura, Yohei Kuga, Shigeya Suzuki · 2020
To derive the performance of recent high-speed Ethernet NICs, interaction between NIC hardware and its driver over PCIe is one of the important design spaces. However, tackling this space is still challenging. Prototyping NICs with hardware requires significant development efforts. Prototyping NICs in software has productivity compared with the hardware ones; however, it does not involve PCIe on which the communication between the driver and device is based. To achieve high productivity by software and prototyping with actual PCIe simultaneously, we propose a development platform for Ethernet NICs in software, but connected with hardware PCIe elements. In this platform, researchers and developers can easily prototype new designs of interaction between an Ethernet device in software and a driver for a hardware NIC over the physical PCIe links. To demonstrate the platform, we prototyped a new interaction for low latency packet transmission on the platform. This demonstration indicates that the platform enables quickly testing the new interactions.