Queued this week into net-next is the NVMeTCP Offload ULP host layer support as part of the broader ongoing effort for complete NVMeTCP Offload infrastructure for use by relevant network drivers/hardware. NVMeTCP Offload will provide full offloading of the NVMeTCP protocol, including the TCP level.
All the technical details around this NVMeTCP Offload work can be found via this merge message .
What excites us are the performance results with CPU utilization on an AMD EPYC server going from 15.1% to 4.7% thanks to the offloading and for a Xeon server going from 16.3% to 1.1%. Additionally, the latency was much better off with going from an average of 105 usec to 39 usec and the 99.99% tail latency going from 570 usec to 91 usec.
This initial work is being done by Marvell and thus focused on their drivers/hardware as initial users.
Those wanting to learn more about the NVMeTCP specification can do so via NVMExpress.org .