[dpdk-stable] [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 0/4] Extend --lcores to run on cores > RTE_MAX_LCORE

[David Marchand]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 9:19 AM Song, Keesang <Keesang.Song at amd.com> wrote:
>
> [AMD Official Use Only - Internal Distribution Only]

Please, get this header removed.
This is a public mailing list.


> Thanks Thomas for bringing this up.
> I consider this is not a new feature, but rather a fix to address the issue with statically assigned maximum lcore limit on high-density CPU platform such as AMD Epyc.
> As I see a lot of DPDK adopters are still using LTS 18.11 & 19.11, and they have 1~2 yrs of lifetime left, we like to backport this to LTS 18.11 & 19.11 at least.

It is not a fix.

The use of static arrays is a design choice that goes back to the
early days in dpdk.
The addition of --lcores came in after this, but it was introduced for
a different use case than placing lcores on any physical core.
And there was no claim that a core > RTE_MAX_LCORE would be usable.


When testing on a new hardware, it is normal to observe some limitations.
Running DPDK on those platforms should be possible: "should be"
because I do not have access to this hardware and saw neither tests
reports nor performance numbers.
Before this patch, the limitation is that on Epyc, cores >
RTE_MAX_LCORE are not usable.


Now, this change is quite constrained.
If we backport it, I don't expect issues in the main dpdk components
(based on code review and ovs tests with a RTE_MAX_LCORE set to 16 on
a 24 cores system).
There might be issues in some examples or not widely used library
which uses a physical core id instead of a lcore id.


This is the same recurring question "do we allow new features in a
stable branch?".


--
David Marchand