Overview
Napatech Link-Capture™ Software is a platform, which can scale to new hardware platforms.
Furthermore, the driver software can scale to new features introduced in the SmartNIC hardware as well as in the driver itself – or in a combination of hardware and software to solve more complicated user scenarios.
Major key points of Napatech Link-Capture™ Software are ease of use, high performance, low CPU utilization and scalable design.
Illustration
This drawing illustrates the architecture of the driver software by showing the various parts.
ntservice
ntservice is the module where most of the functionality is placed and the module that communicates with the SmartNICs.
NT Driver
NT Driver is the kernel space driver, which has a limited functionality. It is used for:
- ISR handling
- PCI bar mmap
- Host buffer allocation/mmap
- Events/locks
- NUMA abstraction
NT Driver is GPL-compliant and therefore open source.
LibNTOS
LibNTOS is the OS abstraction layer that makes it possible for the driver software to support multiple operating systems based on the same code base.
LibNTAPI
LibNTAPI is the library for NTAPI, which is the user API (see NTAPI) and the link to the applications.