Method and system for infiniband® host channel adapter multicast packet replication mechanism

A host channel adapter (HCA) comprising:

• a plurality of underlying functions, wherein each of the plurality of underlying functions corresponds to a virtual machine in a host operatively connected to the HCA;
• a receive packet processing pipeline, the receive packet processing pipeline being configured to:
• receive a multicast packet comprising a multicast header and a payload corresponding to a data portion of the multicast packet;
• store, in a payload random access memory (RAM) within the HCA, the multicast packet payload;
• a multicast inspection engine configured to:
• identify, from the multicast header of the multicast packet, a subset of the plurality of destination underlying functions and a plurality of corresponding destination QPs within a multicast group to which the multicast packet is directed;
• and
• identify, from the multicast header, information to be replicated for each multicast packet destination,
• wherein the receive packet processing pipeline is further configured to:
• inject a number of multicast packet descriptors corresponding to a number of the plurality of corresponding destination QPs identified by the multicast inspection engine into the receive packet processing pipeline, wherein each multicast packet descriptor comprises the information to be replicated;
• and
• copy, from the payload RAM, the multicast packet payload to each of the corresponding destination QPs in host memory.

A system comprising:

• a host comprising:
• a first virtual machine comprising a first destination queue pair (QP);
• and
• a second virtual machine comprising a second destination QP;
• and
• a host channel adapter (HCA) operatively connected to the host and comprising:
• a first underlying function corresponding to the first virtual machine;
• a second underlying function corresponding to the second virtual machine;
• a receive packet processing pipeline, the receive packet processing pipeline configured to:
• receive a multicast packet comprising a multicast header and a payload corresponding to a data portion of the multicast packet;
• store, in a payload random access memory (RAM) within the HCA, the multicast packet payload;
• a multicast inspection engine configured to:
• identify, from the multicast header of the multicast packet, the first and second underlying functions and corresponding first and second destination QPs within a multicast group to which the multicast packet is directed;
• and
• identify, from the multicast header, information to be replicated for each multicast packet destination;
• wherein the receive packet processing pipeline is further configured to:
• inject a multicast packet descriptor for each of the corresponding first and second destination QPs identified by the multicast inspection engine into the receive packet processing pipeline, wherein each multicast packet descriptor comprises the information to be replicated;
• and
• copy, from the payload RAM, the multicast packet payload to each of the first and second corresponding destination QPs in host memory.