DOCA Documentation v3.2.0

DOCA Glossary

The table below provides an extensive glossary of terms, abbreviations, and acronyms used throughout the DOCA SDK documentation.

Term/Acronym

Description/Definition

b

Lower-case b is used to indicate size in bits or multiples of bits (e.g., 1Kb = 1024 bits)

B

Upper-case B is used to indicate size in bytes or multiples of bytes (e.g., 1KB = 1024 bytes)

ACS

Access control services

ASAP 2

Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing

ASN

Autonomous system number

ATF

Arm-trusted firmware

BAR

Base address register

BDF address

Bus, device, function address. The device's PCIe bus address.

BFB

BlueField bootstream

BGP

Border gateway protocol

BMC

Board management controller

BSP

BlueField support package

BUF

Buffer

CBS

Committed burst size

CIR

Committed information rate

CMDQ

Command queue

CPDS

Control pipe dynamic size

CQE

Completion queue events

CTX

Context

DEK

Data encryption key

DMA

Direct memory access

DN

Data network

DOCA

DPU SDK (Data Processing Unit Software Development Kit)

DPA

Data path accelerator; an auxiliary processor designed to accelerate data-path operations.

DPCP

Direct packet control plane

DPDK

Data plane development kit

DPI

Deep packet inspection

DPU

Data processing unit, the third pillar of the data center with CPU and GPU.

DW

Dword

EBS

Excess burst size

ECE

Enhanced connection establishment

ECMP

Equal-cost multi-path

ECPF

Embedded CPU physical function

EIR

Excess information rate

EM

Exact match

eMMC

Embedded multi-media card

ESP

Encapsulating security payload (or EFI system partition)

EU

Execution unit. HW thread; a logical DPA processing unit.

FAR

Forwarding action rule

FIFO

First-in-first-out

FIPS

Federal Information Processing Standards

FLR

Function level reset

FPGA

Field-programmable gate arrays

FW

Firmware

GDAKIN

GPUDirect async kernel-initiated network

GDB

GNU debugger

gNB

Next Generation NodeB

HCA

Host-channel adapter – an InfiniBand (IB) device that terminates an IB link.

Host

When used alone, refers to the server host. Arm host refers to the AARCH64 Linux OS running on the BlueField Arm cores.

HW

Hardware

hwmon

Hardware monitoring

IB

InfiniBand

ICM

Interface configuration memory

ICV

Integrity check value

IDE

Integrated development environment

IKE

Internet key exchange

In-band

Administration activities traversing the IB connectivity only.

IPoIB

IP over InfiniBand

IR

Intermediate representation

IRQ

Interrupt request

iSER

iSCSI RDMA protocol

KPI

Key performance indicator

LFT

Unicast linear forwarding tables

LRO

Large receive offload

LSB

Least significant byte (or least significant bit as lsb)

LSO

Large send offload

LTO

Link-time optimization

MFT

Mellanox firmware tools

MLNX_OFED

Mellanox OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution

MPI

Message passing interface

MSB

Most significant byte (or most significant bit as msb)

MSS

Maximum segment size (or Memory subsystem)

MST

Mellanox software tools

MTU

Maximum transmission unit

NAT

Network address translation

NIC

Network interface card

NIST

National Institute of Standards and Technology

NP

Notification point

NS

Namespace

NUMA

Non-uniform memory access

OOB

Out-of-band

OS

Operating system

OVS

Open vSwitch

PAT

Port address translation

PBA

Pending bit array

PBS

Peak burst size

PCIe

PCI Express

PDR

Packet detection rule

PE

Progress engine

PF

Physical function

PFC

Priority flow control

PHC

Physical hardware clock

PIR

Peak information rate

PK

Platform key

PKA

Public key accelerator

POC

Proof of concept

PR

Path record

PUD

Process under debug

QER

QoS enforcement rule

QoS

Quality of service

RAN

Radio access network

RAP

Reference application

RD

Route distinguisher

RDMA

Remote direct memory access

RDMA CM

RDMA connection manager

RegEx

Regular expression

RN

Request node (e.g., RN-F: Fully coherent, RN-D: IO coherent)

RNG

Random number generator/generation

RoCE

RDMA over converged Ethernet

RP

Reaction point

RQ

Receive queue

RShim

Random shim

RSP

Remote serial protocol

RT

Route target

RTOS

Real-time operating system

RTT

Round-trip time

RX

Receive

RXP

Regular expression processor

SA

Security association (or Subnet administrator)

SBSA

Server base system architecture

SDK

Software development kit

SF

Sub-function or Scalable function

SFC

Service function chaining (in HBN)

SG

Scatter-gather

SHA

Secure hash algorithm

SL

Service level

SM

Subnet Manager

SMF

Session management function

SNAP

Storage-defined network-accelerated processing

SNAT

Source NAT

SPDK

Storage performance development kit

SPI

Security parameters index

SQ

Send queue

SR-IOV

Single-root IO virtualization

SRP

SCSI RDMA protocol

SuperNIC

A configuration of a DPU specific for E-W (East-West) networking.

SVI

Switch virtual interface

SW

Software

Sync event

Synchronization event

TAI

International Atomic Time

TIR

Transport interface receive

TIS

Transport interface send

TLS

Transport layer security

TSO

TCP segmentation offload

TX

Transmit

uDAPL

User direct access programming library

UDS

Unix domain socket

UE

User equipment

UEFI

Unified extensible firmware interface

ULP

Upper layer protocol

UPF

User-plane function

URR

Usage reporting rule

UTC

Coordinated Universal Time

vDPA

Virtual data path acceleration

VF

Virtual function

VFE

Virtio full emulation

vHBA

Virtual SCSI host bus adapter

VM

Virtual machine

VMA

NVIDIA® Messaging Accelerator

VNI

Virtual network identifier (or VXLAN network identifier)

VPI

Virtual protocol interconnect

VRF

Virtual routing and forwarding

VTEP

VXLAN tunnel endpoint

WAN

Wide area network

WorkQ / workq

Work queue

WQE

Work queue elements

WR

Write

XLIO

NVIDIA® Accelerated IO

© Copyright 2025, NVIDIA. Last updated on Nov 20, 2025