[dpdk-dev] DPDK 1.6 and Cisco VIC-NIC pmd fails to initialize with VMWare ESX 5.5

[Karmarkar Suyash]

Hello All,

I am trying some experiments with DPDK 1.6 and Cisco NIC - (0000:06:00.0 Network controller: Cisco Systems Inc. Cisco VIC Ethernet NIC [vmnic0]), on the guest I am using VMXNET3 as interface/pmd and one weird behavior that is see is with VMWare ESX 5.5 DPDK is not able to initialize the NIC and I get the error rte_eth_dev_start failed with error code as, but same NIC and with DPDK 1.6 version works fine with VMWare ESX 6.0 and with VMXNET3 PMD.

Two questions:

1.     Is there any dependency with VMWare version ESX (5.0/5.1/6.0) with DPDK Release version (1.6/1.7/2.x)? If yes can you please let me know?

2.     If we are not using the NIC in pass-through mode and we are using it via Hypervisor - vmxnet3 or virtio pmd is there still a dependency for the list of NIC's supported by DPDK?

Regards
Suyash