Firmware Variants - Firmware Variants - UG1739

Different firmware variants are available for different use cases. These give different trade-offs between functionality, latency, and throughput.

All firmware variants support the Express datapath fully, and identically. The variants differ only in their support for the Enterprise datapath.

The following firmware variants are available:

Full-feature

This variant contains the complete feature set of the firmware, including EVB switching and network overlay acceleration. It does not offer the lowest latency, nor the best packet rate.

Ultra-low-latency

This variant has a reduced feature set to provide the best latency and a high packet rate. Compared to the full-feature variant, features differ as follows:

• No loopback from TX to RX, so:
  • No SR-IOV.
  • No Onload multicast loopback.
  • No TX port sniff (RX supported if licensed).
• No overlay network acceleration.
• No VLAN insert/strip option descriptors.
• Limited filters:
  • Only 1 VLAN MAC filter (full support is 0/1/2 filters).
  • No secure (MAC qualified) filters.
  • No TX MAC security.
• Limitation: There is no WODA support on the Express datapath, whilst it is supported on the Enterprise datapath.

Capture-packed-stream

This variant is optimized for packet rate, and is intended for use with SolarCapture. The RX path can support VIs in packed-stream mode in which received packets are packed into the RX buffers provided in the corresponding RXQ

DPDK

This variant is aimed at DPDK use-cases. It maximizes packet rate for simple filtering scenarios by avoiding the DPDK driver having to unpick packed stream format (which is non-optimal for the DPDK packet buffer model). More advanced filtering scenarios are also supported, but the unpicking causes lower packet rates.