[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v2 00/51] net/mlx4: trim and refactor entire PMD

Adrien Mazarguil adrien.mazarguil at 6wind.com
Fri Sep 1 13:56:29 CEST 2017


On Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 12:24:40PM +0100, Ferruh Yigit wrote:
> Hi Adrien,
> 
> On 9/1/2017 9:06 AM, Adrien Mazarguil wrote:
> > The main purpose of this large series is to relieve the mlx4 PMD from its
> > dependency on Mellanox OFED to instead rely on the standard rdma-core
> > package provided by Linux distributions.
> > 
> > While compatibility with Mellanox OFED is preserved, all nonstandard
> > functionality has to be stripped from the PMD in order to re-implement it
> > through an approach compatible with rdma-core.
> > 
> > Due to the amount of changes necessary to achieve this goal, this rework
> > starts off by removing extraneous code to simplify the PMD as much as
> > possible before either replacing or dismantling functionality that relies on
> > nonstandard Verbs.
> > 
> > What remains after applying this series is single-segment Tx/Rx support,
> > without offloads nor RSS, on the default MAC address (which cannot be
> > configured). Support for multiple queues and the flow API (minus the RSS
> > action) are also preserved.
> > 
> > Missing functionality that needs substantial work will be restored later by
> > subsequent series.
> 
> Thanks for comprehensive re-work, out of curiosity, is adding removed
> functionality planned for this release?

Yes, well for the most part. This includes TX/RX with enhanced performance
(several patches already on ML but I need to review them), scatter/gather,
checksum offloads, packet type recognition, RSS, MAC/VLAN/promisc/allmulti
filtering and related configuration.

Actually, only secondary process support might be missing from the next
release. Since we're separately working on a new approach for mlx5, we'll
see how well it performs before considering a similar change for mlx4.

> 
> > 
> > Also because the mlx4 PMD is mostly contained in a single very large source
> > file of 6400+ lines (mlx4.c) which has become extremely difficult to
> > maintain, this rework is used as an opportunity to finally group functions
> > into separate files, as in mlx5.
> > 
> > This rework targets DPDK 17.11.
> 
> <...>
> 

-- 
Adrien Mazarguil
6WIND


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