Mcafee, Inc.

Stephen Broeker

Rick Lowe

Weimin Liu

Erik De La Iglesia

William James Deninger

Packets can be read from a network interface into an application using a single kernel copy. In one embodiment, the invention includes a receiver packet memory to store captured packets, and a network interface driver operating in a kernel of a device to read packets captured by network interface hardware into the kernel by storing captured packets in the receiver packet memory. Then, an application interface can expose the receiver packet memory to an application executing on the device by representing the receiver packet memory as a virtual file.

High speed packet capture

A file system can be provided in a capture system to efficiently read and write captured objects. In one embodiment, such a file system includes a plurality of queues to queue captured objects to be written to a disk, each queue being associated with one of a plurality of object types, and each queue containing captured objects of the type associated with each queue. A scheduler can be provided to select one of the plurality of queues, and a block manager to select a partition of a disk, the partition being associated with the object type of the captured objects in the selected queue. A disk controller configured to write contiguous blocks of data from the selected queue to the selected partition is connected to the block manager to enable writing to a disk.

File system for a capture system

A tag database storing tags indexing captured object can be searched efficiently. In one embodiment, such a search begins by receiving a query for one or more objects captured by a capture system, and determining whether a query time range exceeds a time range of a set of fast tables. In one embodiment, the invention further includes searching the set of fast tables if the query time range does not exceed the time range of the fast tables, the set of fast tables containing tags having meta-data related to captured objects. In one embodiment, the invention further includes searching a set of hourly tables if the query time range does exceed the time range of the fast tables. In one embodiment, the present invention further includes searching a set of daily tables if the query time range also exceeds the time range of the hourly tables.

Growing community of inventors

Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Stephen Broeker