网卡驱动学习之DCA

Direct Cache Access (DCA),

DCA is a method to improve network I/O performance by placing some posted inbound writes directly within CPU cache. 

DCA potentially eliminates cache misses due to inbound writes.DCA provides a mechanism where the posted write data from an I/O device, such as an Ethernet NIC,  can be placed into CPU cache with a hardware pre-fetch. This mechanism is initialized(初始化) upon a power good reset.

 A device driver for the I/O device configures the I/O device for DCA and sets up the appropriate CPU ID and bus ID for the device to send data.  The device then encapsulates that information in PCIe TLP headers, in the tag field, to trigger a hardware pre-fetch to the CPU cache.