An Alternative to TOE: Intel I/O Acceleration

Intel's I/O Acceleration Technology is a combination of network controller and server chipset features that achieves increased networking performance, and still makes use of the OS's native protocol stack. The first generation of this technology will free up the CPU by providing an asynchronous, low-cost copy mechanism, and better CPU scaling via multiple transmit and receive queues.

We will be describing the changes we implemented to support these new capabilities, both to the network driver and the network stack, as well as other design choices considered. In addition, we will be presenting data on the performance impact of each of these elements, and the cumulative improvement obtained.