Solarflare Communications, Inc.

Martin W Porter

David James Riddoch

Steven Leslie Pope

Steve Leslie Pope

Steve Pope

Roughly described, a network interface device for connection between a host data processing device and a network, comprising: a controller for supporting communication with a host data processing device over a data bus interface; and a packet capture unit between the controller and the network and comprising: a packet inspector configured to parse incoming data packets to identify data packets of a first data flow; a duplication engine to generate a duplicate data flow from the first data flow; and a packet capture engine to process said duplicate data flow into a packet capture data stream having a predefined format. The network interface device is configured to cause: the first data flow to be made available to a consumer process of a host data processing device to which the network interface device is connected; and the processed packet capture data stream to be stored at a packet capture buffer.

Packet capture

Roughly described, incoming data packets are delivered by the NIC directly to at least two user level endpoints. In an aspect, only filters that cannot be ambiguous are created in the NIC. In another aspect, the NIC maintains a filter table supporting direct delivery of incoming unicast and multicast data packets to one user level endpoint. Additional requests to join the same multicast group cause replacement of the NIC filter with one in the kernel. In another aspect, a NIC has limited capacity to maintain multicast group memberships. In response to a new multicast filter request, the kernel establishes it in the NIC only if the NIC still has sufficient capacity; otherwise it is established in the kernel.

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Cambridge, United Kingdom

Martin W Porter