Thursday May 26, 2005

High Performance device driver framework (aka project Nemo) A lot has happened since my last blog. I will talk about it one of these days. But the coolest thing we finished is called project Nemo. Its a high performance device driver framework which allows writing device driver for Solaris a breeze. Its technically GLDv3 framework but we like to call it Nemo instead :)

So what can Nemo do for you? Well, it switches dynamically between interrupt and polling mode (all controlled by IP) to boost performance. Any device driver which support turning the interrupt on/off can take advantage and boost performance by 20-25% by cutting the number of interrupts in more useful manner and improving the latency at the same time. Way superior to interrupt coalescing etc

Ben also finds it pretty useful here. Hey Ben, as you mentioned, lot of people are finding using ethernet pretty useful in storage as well. I'll have some followon news on our iSCSI front soon. The initiator is already done and will be part of S10 update while we are seening some pretty impressive numbers on a Solaris 10 iSCSI target with 10Gb.

Coming back to Nemo, it also does trunking for both 10Gb and 1Gb NICs in a pretty simple way. We demo'd a trunk of 2 10Gb NICs on a 2 CPU machine during the Sunlab's openhouse in april and we ran over 12GBps over the trunk! There are some other cool things Nemo will allow us to do and one of these days I will tell you the details.

(2005-05-26 20:11:56.0) Permalink Comments [1]