[dpdk-dev] plumbing say test-pmd for non-Intel NICs(drivers)

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 29 May 2013 16:23:07 +0200
Antti Kantee <pooka at iki.fi> wrote:

> On 29.05.2013 10:27, somnath kotur wrote:
> > Hi,
> >    Pls pardon me if this has been asked/addressed in another thread. Just
> > wanted to know what i need to do if i wanted to plumb my non-Intel 10G NIC
> > into the DPDK , For instance just into the test-pmd framework would also be
> > fine ?
> > Any pointers /tips welcome?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In short, you'd have to write/port a driver for the NIC.  I very 
> recently did this for the purpose of testing DPDK in a virtual machine 
> (*).  That said, I got off easy since almost all of the driver code 
> already existed, and I only had to make minor edits and redo the parts 
> involved with DMA descriptors.
> 
> If you have an understanding of how NIC drivers work, it will take a 
> varying amount of effort depending on the amount of driver you can 
> copypaste from other sources.  However, there's no way around having to 
> know how drivers work.
> 
>    - antti
> 
> *) https://github.com/anttikantee/dpdk-wm

I have some patches to get rid of some of the Intel driver assumptions.
I will rebase and post them. They aren't a big deal just some of the hardcoded
flag values are a nuisance.