So your NIC hardware is not ready but you need to write the driver....

In this tutorial, David Ahern will guide us to a lightweight approach for developing S/W and H/W in parallel. As H/W design discussions progress, a simplified software model can be built in parallel, capturing the essence of the data pipeline and descriptors. When run with the Linux networking stack, design proposals can be examined from a S/W perspective with actual data based on a networking load.

David will show how to integrate a S/W only device model with Linux and the networking stack - from mimicking PCI probe and init, creating a netdevice, configuring queues and using those queues to send and receive data. Namespaces are used to imitate hosts and allow end-to-end connectivity, facilitating a complete, closed-loop datapath

cheers, jamal