Introduction

Link-Inline™ Software User Guide
Platform
Napatech SmartNIC
Content Type
User Guide
Capture Software Version
Link-Inline™ Software 3.2

Napatech SmartNICs running Link-Inline™ Software offloads inline frame processing.

Main features

Napatech Link-Inline™ Software includes the FPGA bitstreams (FPGA images) and the DPDK source code with the Napatech poll mode driver (PMD) for Napatech SmartNICs. Main features of Napatech SmartNICs running Link-Inline™ Software are:
  • Flow lookup
  • Multiple policy lookups and enforcement
  • Usage metering
  • Protocol encapsulation/decapsulation
  • DSCP tagging
  • Network address translation (NAT)
  • Decrementing IPv4 time to live (TTL) or IPv6 hop limit
  • IP fragmentation

As shown in the following figure, the SmartNIC with Napatech Link-Inline™ Software decodes every received frame and looks up the flow based on the programmed flow information. If the flow of a frame is found (hit) in the flow table of the SmartNIC, the frame is processed according to user-defined rules and actions. The frame is then transmitted on a specified port in a typical scenario. Related usage counters are updated in the SmartNIC and can be retrieved by the application.


Page-1 Sheet.1 Application Application Sheet.2 SmartNIC SmartNIC Sheet.3 Flow lookup Flow lookup Sheet.5 Hairpin offloads Hairpin offloads Sheet.7 RX queue RX queue Sheet.9 TX queue TX queue Bent Arrow.14 Bent Arrow.21 Bent Arrow.25 Simple Arrow.28 HIT HIT Sheet.22 MISS MISS Simple Arrow.29 Bent Arrow.20 Sheet.35 MISS MISS Sheet.37 Simple Arrow.56 Dynamic connector Sheet.59 RX queue RX queue Sheet.60 RX queue RX queue Sheet.63 TX queue TX queue Sheet.64 TX queue TX queue Dynamic connector.65 Sheet.66 Flow table Flowtable Sheet.67 Sheet.68 Usage counters Usagecounters Sheet.69 New rte_flow rules New rte_flow rules

If the flow of a frame is not found (miss), the frame can be forwarded to the host to be processed by the application. The SmartNIC can distribute received frames across multiple RX queues on the host. The application is responsible for processing of the frames, and for configuring the SmartNIC with new flow rules if hardware offload is required. These frames can be forwarded via TX queues to be transmitted on a specified port in the SmartNIC.

Related documents

Use this document to quickly install, configure and process frames using Napatech Link-Inline™ Software. See also the following document for detailed information about Napatech Link-Inline™ Software.
  • DN-1355: Napatech Link-Inline™ Software Features
Note: All Napatech technical documents can also be found on docs.napatech.com (the Napatech Documentation Portal) where you can search and filter to find relevant content.