[dpdk-dev] [PATCHv7 00/47] NXP DPAA2 PMD

[Ferruh Yigit]

On 2/16/2017 1:27 PM, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 08:22:49AM -0500, Neil Horman wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 06:08:59AM +0530, Hemant Agrawal wrote:
>>> The patch series adds NXP’s QorIQ-Layerscape DPAA2 Architecture based
>>> fsl-mc bus driver and network SoC PMD.  This version of the driver
>>> supports NXP LS208xA, LS204xA and LS108x families Network SoCs.
>>>
>>> DPAA2, or Data Path Acceleration Architecture, is a hardware architecture
>>> designed for high-speed network packet processing. It uses a bus name
>>> ‘fsl-mc’, part of Linux Kernel Staging tree [1], for resource management.
>>>
>>> A brief description of architecture is given below; detailed description
>>> is part of the documentation in the patches itself.
>>>
>>> DPAA2 contains hardware component called the Management Complex (or MC).
>>> It manages the DPAA2 hardware resources.  The MC provides an object-based
>>> abstraction for software drivers to use the DPAA2 hardware.
>>>
>>> Some of the key objects are:
>>>     - DPNI, which refers to the network interface object.
>>>     - DPBP, which refers to HW based memory pool object
>>>     - DPIO, refers to processing context for accessing QBMAN
>>>
>>> Besides the MC, DPAA2 also includes a Hardware based Queue and Buffer Manager
>>> called QBMAN. Prime responsibility of QBMAN is to allow lockless access to
>>> software/user-space to the queues and buffers implemented in the hardware.
>>>
>>> The patch series could be logically structured into following sub-areas:
>>> 1. Make file changes for crc in armv8 core machine type and driver dependency
>>> 2. Common dpaa2 hw accelerator drivers for QBMAN.
>>> 3. Indroducing fsl-mc bus as rte_bus, it's componenets.
>>> 4. Introducing dpaa2 pmd driver
>>> 5. Introducing dpaa2 mempool 
>>> 6. Support for DPAA2 Ethernet Device (ethdev)
>>> 7. Additional functionality in DPAA2 ethdev.
>>>
>>> The following design decisions are made during development:
>>>
>>> 1. DPAA2 implements a new bus called "fsl-mc" and some common accelerator drivers.
>>>    These drivers will be shared with dpaa2 based crypto drivers.
>>>
>>> 2. DPAA2 implements the HW mempool offload with DPBP object.
>>>  - The new pool is being configured using compile time option and pool name
>>>    as "dpaa2".
>>>
>>> 3. It maintains per lcore DPIO objects and affine the DPIO instance to the
>>>    processing threads accessing the QBMAN HW.
>>>
>>> Prerequisites:
>>>  - For running the PMD, NXP's SoC (board) and SDK (software/BSP) is required.
>>>    Information about obtaining relevant software is available in the docs
>>>    as part of the patch.
>>
>> NAK.  The SDK requires registration to obtain, and appears to be non-open
>> source.  This driver is unmaintainable given that.
>>
> Hi Hemant,
> 
> can you perhaps clarify things here. What is the requirement to:
> * build the driver/DPDK for the platform
> * run applications using DPDK on the platform
> 
> Also what is the license/availability for those requirements.

Hi Bruce, Hemant, Neil, Thomas,

I did able to compile the driver without the SDK. It looks like that SDK
is a runtime dependency.

What is the DPDK requirement here?
If it is not breaking the build, this PMD provides it.

Thanks,
ferruh