Introduction

Link-Capture™ Software Getting Started Guide

Platform
Napatech SmartNIC
Content Type
Getting Started
Capture Software Version
Link™ Capture Software 12.11

Napatech Link-Capture™ Software is designed for full throughput capture and transmission up to a maximum of 100 Gbits/s for all frame size from 64 bytes to 10,000 bytes.

Napatech Link-Capture™ Software key features

Napatech Link-Capture™ Software includes the FPGA bitstreams (FPGA images) and the driver suite for Napatech SmartNICs. Key features of Napatech Link-Capture™ Software are:
  • Zero packet loss
  • Merging of received frames from multiple ports
  • Time-stamping with 1-nanosecond resolution
  • 4/8/12 GBytes onboard SDRAM for burst buffering
  • CPU load distribution

Frames are processed in the FPGA IP blocks of the SmartNIC such as frame decoder, filter and hasher.

As shown in the figure, the received frames are time-stamped with an internal resolution of 1 nanosecond and merged in order of arrival. Frames are processed in the FPGA IP blocks of the SmartNIC such as frame decoder, filter and hasher. Processed frames are delivered to host buffers via DMA. Frames can be distributed to a maximum of 128 host buffers per SmartNIC. A maximum memory of 1 Tbyte in total is supported for host buffers.

Related documents

Use this document to quickly install, configure and capture frames using Napatech Link-Capture™ Software.

See also the following documents for detailed information about Napatech Link-Capture™ Software.
  • DN-0379: Software installation guide for Linux
  • DN-0428: Libpcap Installation guide
  • DN-0449: Reference documentation about APIs, tools, advanced features as well as code examples
  • DN-0810: Software Architecture
  • DN-0987: SmartNIC filtering user guide
  • DN-1067: Software installation guide for Windows and WinPcap-NT installation guide
  • DN-1128: Feature description
  • DN-1319: Running open-source libraries and applications (libpcap, DPDK, Suricata, Snort, Zeek and TRex)
Note: All Napatech technical documents can also be found on the Napatech Documentation Portal where you can search and filter to find relevant content.
Note: In this document, it is assumed that the Napatech driver and the Napatech libpcap are installed in the default installation directory, /opt/napatech3/. If the Napatech driver and the Napatech libpcap are installed elsewhere, the correct installation directory must be used.
Note: The installation and test processes are verified using CentOS Stream 8 as an example. You must adapt the processes for other Linux distributions or versions.