This book shows software engineers how to program the microengines of Intel's IXP12xx network processors. Assuming no particular background or experience with the IXP12xxarchitecture, the book begins with an explanation of the hardware and development environment. You get an explanation of the right, and sometimes the wrong, approaches to programming the microengines through a series of expanding examples, such as:
 | Receiving and transmitting packets |
| Synchronizing between hardware threads: the non-preemptive microengine thread arbiter, shared variables, atomic memory operations, inter-thread signals, and SRAM CAM locks |
| Using the hash unit and cyclic-redundancy check instructions |
| Writing MicroACEs
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The programming examples are written in structured microC "microblocks," with microengine assembly code used occasionally for illustration.
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