[dpdk-dev] Napatech pmd

[Finn Christensen]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for bringing this discussion up again.

The Napatech PMD is build on top of our proprietary driver. The reason is basically that we utilize many years of driver development and thus reuses the FPGA controlling code in the DPDK PMD. The Napatech driver suite is still closed source.
The current NTNIC PMD dynamically links a Napatech proprietary NTAPI library to control the FPGA on our NICs.

We did think of the PMD as being our responsibility to keep updated towards the Napatech NIC communication, and that we would be engaged and asked to modify accordingly if changes in DPDK required that (maintainer). Furthermore, the PMD compiles with no issues, when NTNIC is enabled.
We have plans to write a stand-alone PMD, but this is not a small task to do, therefore we haven't got to that yet.

If the DPDK community would accept the dynamic linking to a proprietary library, from inside our PMD, then it would be great.

Let me know what you think. Or maybe you have ideas to what else we could do to make it upstream.

Thanks,
Finn


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Thomas Monjalon [mailto:thomas at monjalon.net]
>Sent: 5. januar 2018 16:34
>To: Finn Christensen <fc at napatech.com>
>Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] standardize device identification
>
>It leads to a totally different question:
>Can we discuss again how to integrate your driver in DPDK upstream?
>Please explain again your situation in a new thread.