[dpdk-dev] DPDK and HW offloads

Kyle Larose eomereadig at gmail.com
Mon Mar 21 16:26:07 CET 2016


On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 10:52 AM, Bruce Richardson
<bruce.richardson at intel.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 08:18:57PM +0100, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
>> 2016-03-20 14:17, Zhang, Helin:
>> > From: Thomas Monjalon [mailto:thomas.monjalon at 6wind.com]
>> > > 2016-03-18 10:16, Stephen Hemminger:
>> > > > Right now, all those offload features are pretty much unusable in a
>> > > > real product without lots and lots of extra codes and huge bug
>> > > > surface. It bothers me enough that I would recommend removing much of the
>> > > filter/offload/ptype stuff from DPDK!
>> > >
>> > > One of the biggest challenge is to think about a good filtering API.
>> > > The offloading has some interaction with the mbuf struct.
>> > >
>> > > I would like to suggest rewriting ethdev API by keeping it as is for some time for
>> > > compatibility while creating a new one. What about the prefix dpdk_netdev_ to
>> > > progressively replace rte_eth_dev?
>> >
>> > I totally agree with to add new and generic APIs for user applications. But I don't
>> > think we need to remove all current APIs. Generic APIs may not support all advanced
>> > hardware features, while specific APIs can. Why not support all? One generic APIs for
>> > common users, and others APIs for advanced users.
>>
>> Yes we cannot access to every features of a device through generic API.
>> Until now we were trying to add an ethdev API for every features even if it
>> is used by only one driver.
>> I think we should allow a direct access to the driver by the applications and
>> work on generic API only for common features.
>
> Definite +1.
> I think that we need to start pushing driver-specific functionality to get exposed
> via a driver's header files. That allow users who want to extract the max
> functionality from a particular NIC to do so via those APIs calls, while not
> polluting the generic ethdev layer.
>

What sort of requirements on ABI/API compatibility would this place on
the drivers? I would hope that it would be treated like any other
public API within DPDK. I don't think this would be too onerous, but
it would require that the drivers be designed to deal with it. (I.e.
don't just expose any old internal driver function).

> On the other hand, I don't like the idea of dpdk_netdev. I think we can work
> within the existing rte_eth_dev framework.
>
> /Bruce
>


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