Design a scalable ethernet Network Interface supporting the Large Receive Offload

The Ethernet speed has increased to 40-100 Gbps since the release of IEEE P802.3ba. In this paper, we have enhanced the Intel´s Large Receive Offload Linux software driver function to manage the out-of-order packets and designed a scalable Network Interface based RISC core to support this function in the Network Interface. The RISC´s performance and data movements for high communication rates up to 100 Gbps have been measured, and the results presented herein show that a cost-effective embedded RISC core can provide the required efficiency of the network interface to support a wide range of transmission line speeds, up to 100 Gbps. Furthermore, we have found several techniques that can contribute to packet processing and work with fewer headers and less data copying in a host memory.