Users Guide

Table Of Contents
Broadcom NetXtreme-E-UG304-2CS
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NetXtreme-E User Guide User Guide for Dell Platforms
4.11 RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCE
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is a complete hardware offload feature in the
NetXtreme-E that allows RDMA functionality over an Ethernet network. RoCE functionality is available in user mode and
kernel mode application. RoCE Physical Functions (PF) and SR-IOV Virtual Functions (VF) are available in single function
mode and in multi-function mode (NIC Partitioning mode). Broadcom supports RoCE in Windows, Linux, and VMware.
See the following links for RDMA support for each operating system:
Windows
Microsoft SMB Direct
Redhat Linux
Red Hat Infiniband and RDMA Networking
VMware
VMware Network Requirements for RDMA
4.12 VMWare Enhanced Networking Stack (ENS)
VMware with Intel designed ENS to support DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) based NFV (Network Functions
Virtualization) applications.
4.12.1 Features
This section contains the supported features of ENS:
New and faster vSphere networking stack targeted for NFV applications.
DPDK techniques employed with new vmxnet3 virtual device backend.
New poll mode and interrupt mode physical device drivers.
Faster switching using flow cache.
Deliver improved performance while supporting vSphere features.
4.12.2 ENS Design Choices
This section contains ENS design choices for improved and deterministic performance:
Dedicated CPU allocation to system thread and polling.
NUMA-aware placement of VM and system threads.
NUMA-aware allocation with large pages.
Simplified packet representation.
Use of flow cache.
Lockless datapath.
Vmxnet3 optimizations.
Streaming SIMD Extension(SSE) instructions faster packet processing.