[dpdk-dev] Is it possible to have dpdk running with no dependency on a nic ?

[Jayakumar, Muthurajan]

Can you please refer Chapter 15.1.2 of the programmer's manual http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/guides/intel-dpdk-programmers-guide.pdf titled "Rings-based PMD".
It indicates that  " To run an Intel(r) DPDK application on a machine without any Ethernet devices, a pair of ring-based rte_ethdevs can be used as below"
As Vivek indicated, the ring based PMD (libte_pmd_ring) allows a set of s/w FIFOs (that is rte_ring) to be accessed using the PMD APIs, as though they were physical NICs"

-----Original Message-----
From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Ymo Lists
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 9:20 AM
Cc: dev at dpdk.org
Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] Is it possible to have dpdk running with no dependency on a nic ?

Could you please point me to a sample doing this ? All the sample i have seen are initializing the eal and that involves initializing the nics. Is there a sample ? Can you mock up some code ?

plz plzzz :-)


On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 3:42 AM, Vivek Soni <tellviveks at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, It is very well possible to run DPDK without dependency on the NIC.
> But it all depends what you want to do.
> The two DPDK applications can communicate using the ring library 
> provided by DPDK. In case there is no NIC, DPDK provides pure software 
> based PMDs which can be used on systems without a NIC or with 
> unsupported NIC using standard kernel drivers.
>
> Hope it helps.
>
> Regards,
> Vivek
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 1:49 AM, Ymo Lists <ymolists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Is this a faq ???
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 1:21 PM, Ymo Lists <ymolists at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > 1) I have two apps that need to communicate on the same machine . 
> > > Is it possible to have these two apps communicating via dpdk 
> > > without
> > referencing
> > > a nic ?
> > >
> > > 2) The apps need to run on an amazon vm. How can you run dpdk on 
> > > an
> > amazon
> > > vm with only one nic if the above is not possible ?
> > >
> >
>