Ixa Architecture Network Processors, Software Application Development Research

The Network Processor is being thinked the core technology on accelerate the development of agility and high performance of network, so many company issued all kinds of network processor production.As the the magnate of the industry , Intel Corp supported the development and research on the network processor software application by making collaborate plan with many colleges And this project is based on this plan.The research object is the IPX2400,and it is the the second generation network processor in Intel product family.In this family, they are common hardware structure and software development model,and the only defference between them is the application area So the development on IXP2400 is also the based development for the high area and low area network device development.The network processor development belongs to the embedded development.Being its complex protocol format ,data structure and complex hardware data way ,it required the devepment programmer having good network knowledge, high level programming technology on hardware and software.The project focust on the software development application based on IXP2400.By analyzing the hardware architecture and the software development movable model ,giving an example of IPv4 packet forwarding ,we try to give a vallable reference and direcotor for network application development programmer in order to find a model on NP development. First,the article introduced the IXP2400 hardware architecture and analysed the hardware accelerate technology feature in it. Then,labored analysing the movable software developmenet model and trategy,also gived an example of the anylysing and implement of the the IPv4 package forwarding and key technology. At last,give an detailed describing about the network application development on IXP2400 appling on the based network service.