[dpdk-dev] proposal: raw packet send and receive API for PMD driver

[Wiles, Keith]

On 5/26/15, 11:18 PM, "Lin XU" <lxu at astri.org> wrote:

>I think it is very important to decouple PMD driver with DPDK framework.
>   (1) Currently, the rte_mbuf struct is too simple and hard to support
>complex application such as IPSEC, flow control etc. This key struct
>should be extendable to support customer defined management header and
>hardware offloading feature.

I was wondering if adding something like M_EXT support for external
storage to DPDK MBUF would be more reasonable.

IMO decoupling PMDs from DPDK will possible impact performance and I would
prefer not to let this happen. The drivers are written for performance,
but they did start out as normal FreeBSD/Linux drivers. Most of the core
code to the Intel drivers are shared between other systems.

>   (2) To support more NICs.
>So, I thinks it time to add new API for PMD(a no radical way), and
>developer can add initial callback function in PMD for various upper
>layer protocol procedures.

We have one callback now I think, but what callbacks do you need?

The only callback I can think of is for a stack to know when it can
release its hold on the data as it has been transmitted for retry needs.
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