[Winpcap-users] Killer NIC compatible with winpcap ?

[Guy Harris]

On Feb 11, 2009, at 2:43 PM, Charu Agrawal wrote:

> It is an Ethernet card with on board processor

Depending on the definition of "processor", there are probably other  
cards that have that.

> and 64MB onboard memory.

Other Ethernet cards have on-board memory, although whether they have  
that much, I don't know.

Here's the Web page for the NIC:

	http://www.killernic.com/

*IF* this page is to be believed, they do some unspecified form of  
network offloading:

	http://www.killernic.com/technology/llr.aspx

Whether "LLR literally bypasses the traditional Windows Networking  
Stack, enabling an entirely new game-optimized model of networking.  
The new networking model means there is a hardware interrupt for every  
gaming network packet, giving network traffic unprecedented speed and  
priority in your gaming PC." means that they just have a TCP offload  
engine or whether they eat the whole networking stack and provide  
their own API to games (so that games have to be modified in order to  
use the Killer NIC as anything other than a regular dumb networking  
card).

It sounds as if they do the latter, as they have a list of games  
modified to work with their NIC.  If so, then, no, this NIC isn't  
compatible with WinPcap when it's providing networking offloading; it  
presumably allows the Windows networking stack to transmit packets on  
and receive packets from the NIC, so that applications *not* modified  
to use their API will work, and, for *those* packets, WinPcap *should*  
work unless the NDIS (standard Windows networking stack) part of the  
driver doesn't implement everything that WinPcap requires (or they do  
something really wacky, such as not using NDIS *at all* and somehow  
hooking into the userland Winsock library, if that's possible).

So this card almost certainly won't and can't be fully functional with  
WinPcap (at least not without changes being made to WinPcap *with the  
cooperation of Bigfoot Networks*).  How functional it is depends on  
how they connect to the Windows networking stack, if they do so at all.