ENA is a networking interface designed to make good use of modern CPU
features and system architectures.
The ENA device exposes a lightweight management interface with a
minimal set of memory mapped registers and extendable command set
through an Admin Queue.
The driver supports a range of ENA devices, is link-speed independent
(i.e., the same driver is used for 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, etc.), and has
a negotiated and extendable feature set.
Some ENA devices support SR-IOV. This driver is used for both the
SR-IOV Physical Function (PF) and Virtual Function (VF) devices.
ENA devices enable high speed and low overhead network traffic
processing by providing multiple Tx/Rx queue pairs (the maximum number
is advertised by the device via the Admin Queue), a dedicated MSI-X
interrupt vector per Tx/Rx queue pair, and CPU cacheline optimized
data placement.
The ENA driver supports industry standard TCP/IP offload features such
as checksum offload and TCP transmit segmentation offload (TSO).
Receive-side scaling (RSS) is supported for multi-core scaling.
The ENA driver and its corresponding devices implement health
monitoring mechanisms such as watchdog, enabling the device and driver
to recover in a manner transparent to the application, as well as
debug logs.
Some of the ENA devices support a working mode called Low-latency
Queue (LLQ), which saves several more microseconds. This feature will
be implemented for driver in future releases.