Hanic

The Hardware Accelerated Network Interface Card, abbreviated as HANIC, is both software and firmware that brings additional functionality to the COMBO family cards. 10G HANIC is dual-port 10 Gbps network interface card with hardware accelerated features. The main feature of HANIC is the distribution of incoming traffic among 8 software interfaces (DMA channels), which can be then processed by a single CPU core each. The HANIC packet distribution among channels is based on a hash computed from extracted packet header fields, and therefore preserves the flow-to-core mapping. The selection of the input fields to hash is configurable and the following header fields are supported:

  • IP version
  • Source and destination IP address (version 4 and 6)
  • L4 protocol
  • Ports (TCP and UDP)
Simplified scheme of HANIC firmware

Simplified scheme of HANIC firmware

Features

Apart from the features already mentioned, HANIC firmware also supports the following:

  • Sampling of packets 1:N.
  • Swapping source and destination address and port for the hash computation (for monitoring of both directions of communication at the same CPU core).
  • Round-robin distribution of packets.
  • Trimming of packets to set length.
  • Precise timestamps.
  • Hash-based sampling of packets.
  • Basic filtering of packets by given rules.
  • Basic firewall.
  • Export of parsed packet header fields to software (instead of full packet).