Introduction

Napatech Link-Capture™ Software is designed for full-throughput capture and transmission at rates up to 100 Gbits/s for all frame sizes 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-Gbyte onboard SDRAM for burst buffering
CPU load distribution

Figure 1. Napatech Link-Capture™ Software features

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

As shown in the figure, received frames are time-stamped with an internal resolution of 1 nanosecond and merged in their arrival order. They are processed by FPGA IP blocks in the SmartNIC such as frame decoder, filter and hasher. After processing, frames are delivered to host buffers via DMA. They can be distributed to a maximum of 256 or 128 host buffers. The SmartNIC supports a total host buffer memory capacity of 1 Tbyte.

For more information on the supported number of host buffers, see Buffer System in DN-1128.

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.