METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DYNAMIC PACKET BATCHING WITH A HIGH PERFROMANCE NETWORK INTERFACE

摘要

A system and method are provided for identifying related packets in a communication flow for the purpose of collectively processing them on a host computer. A packet received at a network interface is parsed to retrieve information from a protocol header. A flow key is generated to identify a communication flow that includes the packet, and is stored in a database of flow keys. When the packet is placed in a queue to be transferred to a host computer, the flow key and/or its index in the database is stored in a separated queue. A dynamic packet batching module searches for a packet in the same flow as the packet being transferred. If a related packet is located, the host computer is alerted and delays processing the transferred packet until the related packet is also received. By collectively processing the related packets, processor time is more efficiently utilized.