The Solarflare SFN8000 and X2 series adapters support multicast replication where received packets are replicated in hardware and delivered to multiple receive queues. This feature allows any number of Onload clients, listening to the same multicast data stream, to receive their own copy of the packets, without an additional software copy and without the need to share Onload stacks. As illustrated below, the packets are delivered multiple times by the controller to each receive queue that has installed a hardware filter to receive the specified multicast stream.
Multicast replication is performed in the adapter transparently and does not need to be explicitly enabled.
This feature removes the need to share Onload stacks using the EF_NAME environment variable. Users using EF_NAME exclusively for sharing multicast traffic can now remove EF_NAME from the configurations.