Networking NVIDIA Accelerated IO (XLIO) Documentation
Networking NVIDIA Accelerated IO (XLIO) Documentation
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NVIDIA Accelerated IO (XLIO) Documentation Rev 3.60

Overview

The NVIDIA® Accelerated IO (XLIO) software library accelerates TCP and UDP network applications by delivering high bandwidth, low latency, and reduced CPU utilization. Built as a user-space library with a kernel-bypass architecture, XLIO enables direct data transfer between application memory and network adapters for optimal performance.

XLIO provides two APIs to meet different application requirements:

  • POSIX Socket API – offers zero-cost integration with existing applications. No code changes are required to achieve substantial networking performance improvements; applications can be accelerated simply by preloading the XLIO library.

  • Ultra Socket API – designed for applications demanding maximum performance. While it requires additional integration effort, it enables advanced capabilities such as true zero-copy data transfers and a simplified, highly optimized data path.

XLIO seamlessly integrates with cryptography-enabled NVIDIA® ConnectX® network adapters and NVIDIA® BlueField® DPUs, providing hardware-offloaded Transport Layer Security (TLS) symmetric encryption and decryption. It also leverages hardware acceleration features such as Large Receive Offload (LRO), TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO), and Striding-RQ to further enhance performance for both POSIX and Ultra API users.

XLIO is an open-source project, and we welcome contributions from the community. Please visit us on GitHub and see our Contributing Guide to get started.

Document contents:

System Requirements

The following table presents the currently certified combinations of stacks and platforms and supported CPU architectures for the current XLIO version.

Specification

Value

Network Adapter Cards

NVIDIA Bluefield-3, 200 GbE, Dual Port, 32GB RAM

NVIDIA ConnectX-7, 200 GbE, Dual Port

NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Dx, 100GbE, Dual Port

Firmware

BlueField-3 32.47.1026

ConnectX-7 28.47.1026

ConnectX-6 Dx 22.47.1026

Driver Stack

  • DOCA-Host v3.2.0doca-libxlio profiledoca-roce profile

NOTE: Starting this version, the host driver is part of the NVIDIA DOCA package.
For further information, please see NVIDIA MLNX_OFED to DOCA-OFED Transition Guide.

Supported Operating Systems and Kernels

  • Ubuntu 24.04

  • Ubuntu 22.04

  • RHEL 8.6

  • DPU only:
    CTYUNOS 23.01

CPU Architecture

x86_64, Arm (on NVIDIA BlueField-3 and NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hoppera)

Minimum memory requirements

1 GB of free memory for installation 800 MB per process running with XLIO

Minimum disk space requirements

1 GB

Transport

Ethernet 

a. NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper is only supported with Ubuntu 22.04.

Document Revision History

For the list of changes made to this document, refer to User Manual Revision History.


 

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