in modern NICs, I heard that there are these processors that are specially designed for processing incoming network packets and doing tasks like filtering and more, and I was wondering how do they actually interpret the incoming network packets as? Like do they have their own ISA and follow their own instructions? Do they have access to DMA or can they make requests to it?
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Are you talking about offloading? Otherwise you'd need to refine your question.– Zac67 ♦Commented Oct 20 at 19:30
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Yeah I think it's the TCP offload engine– 19216811Commented Oct 20 at 19:37
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1 Answer
TCP offloading features integrated into the NIC are most often hardwired, but there are "smart" NICs that are programmable, usually via FPGA.
All modern NICs use DMA.
