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

[Patel, Rashmin N]

What is the error code it failed with?

There is no dependency between ESXi and DPDK versions as such. But depending your VM settings, it may pop up some issues related to memory assigned to VM.

When you use NIC in Hypervisor and feed packets to VM via Vmxnet3, the guest OS can use Vmxnet3-pmd and that's the sole requirement. Guest OS or DPDK API in VM are unaware and independent of the physical NIC beneath.
When you use NIC in VM via Passthrough (or device direct assignment,) the guest OS can use ixgbe-pmd/igb-pmd/xyz-pmd to control them for Rx/Tx operations. ESXi can't look into such device operations like it can't see packets coming in or going out.
When you enable SRIOV on a NIC, you get a PF and multiple VFs and if you use a NIC-Virtual Function via passthrough, the guest OS can use respective pmd (ixgbevf/igbvf/xyzvf) in DPDK API to control it for Rx/Tx ops. ESXi control the Physical Function through a respective driver (ixgbe/igb/xyz provided with ESXi) DPDK API doesn't have support to run in ESXi to control that PF.

Thanks,
Rashmin

-----Original Message-----
From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Karmarkar Suyash
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2015 8:34 PM
To: dev at dpdk.org
Subject: [dpdk-dev] DPDK 1.6 and Cisco VIC-NIC pmd fails to initialize with VMWare ESX 5.5

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