Winsock Direct and Sockets Direct Protocol

Winsock Direct and Sockets Direct Protocol

Winsock Direct is a high-speed interconnect introduced on Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. It is a protocol that runs over special hardware available from several vendors, such as Giganet, Compaq, and others. What is so special about Winsock Direct is that it completely bypasses the TCP stack and goes directly to the network interface card, which allows for extremely high-speed data communications. The advantage of Winsock Direct is that it is completely transparent to a TCP Winsock application. That is, if a TCP application is run on a machine with a Winsock Direct capable card, it transparently goes over the Winsock Direct route (given that it is the appropriate route) instead of over a regular Ethernet connection.

The Sockets Direct Protocol is the next evolution of the Winsock Direct protocol. It is designed to run over Infiniband-compatible hardware available in future releases of the Windows operating system. The on the wire protocol is slightly different than that of Winsock Direct but it is still transparent to the applications.

Because Winsock Direct is designed to be transparent, the same issues encountered with “regular” Winsock applications still apply when running over Winsock Direct. Applications still have to manage the number of outstanding overlapped operations so as to not exceed the locked pages or non-paged pool limits.



Network Programming for Microsoft Windows
Network Programming for Microsoft Windows (Microsoft Professional Series)
ISBN: 0735605602
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 172
Authors: Anthony Jones

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