Intel IXA SDK ACE Programming Framework - Department of ...

OMS for Global Application Services
appear, from the Linux TCP/IP stack point of view, as standard Ethernet interfaces.
This provides a means for you to re-use existing or third-party protocol stack or
management plane software while migrating an application to the ACE model.
OMS for Global Application Services
Object Management System (OMS) services are part of the IXA API. The OMS, part of
the IXA system software, is a single logical entity with components distributed
throughout the system. Any ACE can make use of OMS services. Any program that
must communicate with an ACE can do so by registering itself with the OMS as a task.
An application uses global C functions defined by the OMS services to create,
configure, control, and destroy objects and structures in all parts of the application,
and to perform global tasks. The primary global services your application requires
are:
l
l
l
Creating and destroying ACEs and tasks
Defining and controlling packet flow using targets
Communicating among ACEs and tasks
The OMS contains the following parts:
l The Resolver, which creates and deletes ACEs, and manages packet flow by
binding ACEs and targets.
l
The Name Server, which manages the name space for the OMS, maintaining a
correspondence between names and internal identifiers for ACEs, targets and
tasks. The name space allows objects that might be distributed among processors
to address one another unambiguously.
In order to communicate with and through the OMS, a program must create a
communications channel, a separate process or thread containing a communication
access process, or CAP. A program can communicate with both the Resolver and the
Name Server through the same CAP. When you create an ACE or task structure, a
CAP is automatically created with it. The OMS provides functions to retrieve the
CAP for use as an argument to other OMS functions.
Creating ACEs
An application’s manager program creates and initializes the application’s ACEs by
calling Resolver functions in the OMS. To do this, it must first register with the OMS
as a task, using the ASL function ix_task_init. The task provides access to a CAP
channel through which to communicate with the Resolver.
You define an initialization function in the ACE executable to create the ACE structure
and all support structures such as packet destination targets, data sets and
elements, crosscalls, and events.
When the manager program creates the ACE, you pass the ACE executable to the
Resolver function ix_res_create_ace. This calls the initialization function and
starts the ACE’s main loop, which begins packet and crosscall event processing.
10 Introduction and Overview
Revision 3.3, August 2001