46. NTNIC Poll Mode Driver

The NTNIC PMD provides poll mode driver support for Napatech smartNICs.

46.1. Design

The NTNIC PMD is designed as a pure user-space driver, and requires no special Napatech kernel modules.

The Napatech smartNIC presents one control PCI device (PF0). NTNIC PMD accesses smartNIC PF0 via vfio-pci kernel driver. Access to PF0 for all purposes is exclusive, so only one process should access it. The physical ports are located behind PF0 as DPDK port 0 and 1.

46.2. Supported NICs

  • NT200A02 2x100G SmartNIC

    • FPGA ID 9563 (Inline Flow Management)

All information about NT200A02 can be found by link below: https://www.napatech.com/products/nt200a02-smartnic-inline/

46.3. Features

  • FW version
  • Speed capabilities
  • Link status (Link update only)
  • Unicast MAC filter
  • Multicast MAC filter
  • Promiscuous mode (Enable only. The device always run promiscuous mode)

46.3.1. Limitations

Linux kernel versions before 5.7 are not supported. Kernel version 5.7 added vfio-pci support for creating VFs from the PF which is required for the PMD to use vfio-pci on the PF. This support has been back-ported to older Linux distributions and they are also supported. If vfio-pci is not required, kernel version 4.18 is supported.