[dpdk-dev] Poor SRIOV performance with ESXi Linux guest

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 22:18:27 +0000
Ale Mansoor <mansooraa at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  Getting less than 100 packets per second throughput between VF's under my Fedora FC20 VM running under ESXi 6.0 with DPDK l2fwd (Used as ./l2fwd -c 0xf -n 4 -- -p 0x3 -T 1)

That is many orders of magnitude less than expected.

 
> Questions:
> ---------------
>  
> Q1) Is DPDK + SRIOV under ESXi supposed to use the igb_uio driver or the vfio-pci driver inside Linux guest os ?

You have to use igb_uio, there is no emulated IOMMU in ESX

> Q2) What is the expected l2fwd performance when running DPDK under the Linux guest OS under ESXI with SRIOV ?

Depends on many things. With SRIOV you should reach 10Mpps or more.
Did you try running Linux on baremetal on same hardware first?

> Q3) Any idea what may be preventing vfio-pci driver from binding to the VF's inside the guest instance ?

vfio-pci needs IOMMU which is not available in guest.

> Q4) Why is igb_uio performing so poorly ?

Don't blame igb_uio. It is probably something in system or vmware.