Oriented Network Processor Software Development Platform

Nowadays with the development of network transmit technology, Data rates are increasing, Protocols are becoming more dynamic and also being introduced more rapidly. All of this causes the increasing requirement for future network equipment. The combination of high-performance processing power and flexibility in network processors has made them a good solution for today's packet processing needs. It can provide the foundation for a wide range of network devices.But software problem has prevented network processors from achieving their full potential. It has more than one tool-chains for they have several processors. Programming multi-threaded micro-engines will surely undercuts network processor time-to-market benefit. Different Vendor have different architecture, microcode is unique to a specific NP which definitely negate the flexibility benefit.The main destination of integrated software development platform is to remove hardware dependencies from network applications, reduce product development difficulty and time, optimize the performance of system for programmers and network equipment designers. This paper first introduces the hardware infrastructure and software IXA portable framework of Intel IXP2400 Network Processor. Then we discuss the design of software platform. We categorized it into two parts: front-end tools and backend tools. In the front-end tools, we provide programmer a GUI environment for their design. We also define a kind of high level descriptor language and some components for them. The back end tools mainly contain code generator and data plane libraries.Packet scheduling is the key mechanism for Internet QoS guarantee. As part of the software platform, this paper describes the research and implementation of SFQ/DWCS and URR scheduling algorithm component based on network processors. We use some special way according to NP characteristic to achieve efficiency which is a good reference for development on all the NP platforms. This paper also contains the introduction of future work and research direction on NP platform and Packet scheduler.The work in this thesis is part of National High-Tech Research and Development Program entitled "Key technology new operating system for network processor" and is also assisted by Northwestern Polytechnical University Postgraduate Seed Foundation.