I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) is a
DMA engine (an embedded
DMA controller
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems and allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU).
Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output, it is ...
) by
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
bundled with high-end server
motherboards, that offloads memory copies from the
main processor by performing
direct memory access
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems and allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU).
Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output, it is ...
es (DMA). It is typically used for accelerating network traffic, but supports any kind of copy.
Using I/OAT for network acceleration is supported by
Microsoft Windows since the release of
Scalable Networking Pack for
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, 2 ...
SP1. However, it is no longer included in Windows from version 8 on-wards. It was used by the
Linux kernel starting in 2006 but this feature was subsequently disabled due to an alleged lack of performance benefits while creating a possibility of data corruption.
See also
*
References
External links
I/OAT Home siteAccelerating Network Receive Processing. Intel I/O Acceleration Technology// Proceedings of the Linux Symposium, 2005
copy
Memory copies in hardware LWN.net
LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to ...
, December 7, 2005, by Jonathan Corbet
*Net-DMA Driver
Intel
Network acceleration
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