The OpenNIC project provides an FPGA-based NIC platform for the open source community. It consists of two components, a NIC shell and a Linux kernel driver. The NIC shell is an RTL project for Xilinx FPGA, and currently targets two of the Xilinx Alveo board family. It delivers a NIC implementation supporting up to four PCI-e physical functions (PFs) and two 100Gbps Ethernet ports. The shell is equipped with well-defined data and control interfaces and is designed to enable easy integration of user logic into the shell. A block diagram of the OpenNIC shell follows:

The Linux kernel driver implements the device driver for the NIC shell. It supports multiple PFs and multiple TX/RX queues in each PF. The RX queues are selected through a receive-side scaling (RSS) implementation in the shell.

The goal of OpenNIC is to enable fast prototyping of hardware-accelerated network-attached applications. It is not a fully-fledged SmartNIC solution.

The latest version of OpenNIC is 1.0, which uses OpenNIC shell version 1.0 and OpenNIC driver version 1.0 or OpenNIC DPDK driver version 1.0.

This repository serves as the release point for the OpenNIC project, which consists of three components:

• OpenNIC shell,
• OpenNIC driver, and
• OpenNIC DPDK.

A released version of OpenNIC pins to a commit in the master branch of each component repository.

A Bash script script/checkout.sh is provided to checkout a specific version of OpenNIC. It takes two arguments, the root directory for the cloned repositories and optionally, a version number. By default, it will checkout the latest version. The correspondence between OpenNIC versions and component repository tags are tracked in script/version.yaml.

A technical reference guide (PDF version or MS Word version) provides details of the design of the OpenNIC. The document primarily covers the hardware architecture and its related implementation. It also briefly describes the organization of the Linux kernel driver for OpenNIC.

A set of frequently asked questions has been prepared to help in answering questions regarding this project. The FAQ has sections for: (a) general questions, (b) feature set questions, (c) hardware questions, (d) software questions, and (e) operation questions. Please contact us to submit any additional questions that you feel would help others.

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