Tuesday, July 23, 2019
8:20-9:45 - Tuesday Open Session Time
Room: Square Dorchester

Chairs: Jamal Hadi Salim, Mirja Kühlewind

Title: How NICs Work Today

Speakers: Tom Herbert, Simon Horman, Andy Gospodarek

Abstract:

  This session will start with description of how a basic Network
  Interface Card (NIC) operates and lead into NIC feature evolution.
  The discussion will delve into several NIC features starting from
  fundamental packet IO, leading to incremental offload of
  packet processing from server processors to modern NIC hardware.

  The software models described for controlling these NICs center 
  around Linux kernel APIs that were created to take advantage of 
  hardware capabilities.  When sensible, the relationship of a feature
  that a NIC handles will be related to specific IETF activity (eg
  transport, security, nvo3, etc).