Myricom: Extreme Performance Ethernet

for Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and VMware ESX

For standard TCP/IP and UDP/IP 10-Gigabit Ethernet applications, Myri-10G network adapters and software deliver excellent performance at low cost, and are fully compliant with Ethernet standards. Offloads in the driver and Network Adapter firmware provide low host-CPU load even at near-wire-speed throughput rates.

Software. The driver and Network Adapter firmware for 10-Gigabit Ethernet operation is currently available for Linux, Windows, Solaris 10, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and VMware ESX. The driver was contributed to and accepted in the Linux kernel, and is included in the 2.6.18 and later kernels and in many Linux distributions. However, the driver available by download will be more up-to-date. The driver is also included in FreeBSD 7.0. The Windows software distributions are WHQL-certified.

Myri-10G 10-Gigabit Ethernet Driver Downloads

Offloads. The driver and Network Adapter firmware implement zero-copy on the send side with all supported operating systems, and, depending on the OS, use a variety of highly effective stateless offloads, including:

• Interrupt Coalescing
• IP and TCP checksum offload, send and receive
• TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload, also known as Large Send Offload)
• RSS (Receive-Side Scaling)
• LRO (Large Receive Offload)
• Multicast filtering

Form factors. All of the one-port and most of the two-port Myri-10G network adapters are available as low-profile (half-height) PCI Express add-in cards. Low-profile cards allow the option of installation in some 2U servers without the need for a riser card. Myri-10G network adapters include standard and low-profile faceplates where applicable. If you compare the photos below, you'll see that the cards are the same but that they have different PCI faceplates.

Low-profile PCI Express add-in card with a standard PCI faceplate	Low-profile PCI Express add-in card with a low-profile PCI faceplate
10G-PCIE-8B-2S	10G-PCIE-8BL-2S

Some 10-Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter vendors are ambiguous about the capabilities of dual-port network adapters. Myri-10G network adapters with two network ports are always listed as either:

• Two ports for failover: These network adapters appear to the host operating system as one PCI device. The failover between network ports is handled by the Network Adapter firmware with a response time that can be set to as little as ~10µs. Either port can operate at near wire speed, but not both at the same time. The performance listed above is representative of the active port.
• Two ports for performance: These network adapters appear to the host operating system as two PCI devices. In hosts with sufficient PCI Express and memory bandwidth, both ports can operate concurrently at near wire speed. These network adapters can be regarded as two independent network devices, and the performance listed above can be achieved concurrently on both ports. Of course, the two ports can also be used for failover.

Myricom also produces Myri-10G network adapters in other form factors, including High Speed Expansion Cards (HSECs) for the IBM BladeCenter H.

Ethernet interoperability has been demonstrated with 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches from Myricom, Brocade (Foundry), Extreme, Fujitsu, HP, Quadrics, SMC, Force10, Cisco, Blade Network, Broadcom, and Arista.

PCI Express interoperability has been verified with all of the common PCI Express chipsets and many commercially available motherboards.