Qualcomm Network Accelerator in SoC, what does it do?

[feiyeung]

Looking through Qualcomm's SoC specification page, for example IPQ 8069 and IPQ 4069, the former mentions a Network Subsystem of Network Accelerator at 800MHz. Yet, i can barely find any info on this component on Internet.

Since it's listed with a clock outside of the CPU row, i can only assume it's a dedicated processor or even ASIC. I wonder if anyone might share with detail info on it, especially on its significance/impact on the NAT/routing performance. Thanks!

 

[avtella]

The NSS co processors handle routing & traffic offload functions. I think the reason you might not have gotten enough relevant search results is that the units are more commonly referred to as the Networking Subsystem (NSS) co-processors.


Here’s a more detailed copy and paste from this source, http://www.bitswrt.com/IPQ8064.html:

“Each network-accelerator engines supports 12 threads of execution, operating in parallel. NSS functions include L2/L3 routing/bridging, Samba acceleration, LRO/TSO offload, connectivity accleration, as well as traffic management. The IPQ8064 typically runs an OpenWRT Linux IP stack on the Dual Core SMP Krait, while the NSS accelerates networking traffic (fast path). The NSS operates under full control of the Linux stack. Rules in the NSS are set by the Linux stack. Networking packets that do not match these rules are passed on to the Linux stack through an exception handling mechanism in the NSS.”

More detailed diagramatic info:
http://people.netfilter.org/pablo/netdev0.1/slides/IPQ806x-Hardware-acceleration_v2.pdf