Transparent Integration of a Low-Latency Linux Driver for Dolphin SCI and DX

High-speed interconnects like Dolphin’s SCI and DX fulfil even high communication performance requirements. One of the prerequisites, though, is that the communication software must be either based on IP sockets or specifically adapted to the interconnect. Software written directly for Ethernet, arguably the most widespread interconnect today, cannot profit from this fast hardware. In this article, we present a Linux driver that fills this gap by allowing transparent usage of Dolphin hardware. ETHOM provides an Ethernet interface and makes use of the lowest message passing layer of Dolphin’s driver stack in order to exchange Ethernet frames. It enhances the functionality of SCI and DX by offering an Ethernet and with that an IP interface.