20.11.4 patches review and test

[Ali Alnubani]

Hi,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Xueming(Steven) Li <xuemingl at nvidia.com>
> Sent: Monday, December 6, 2021 6:15 PM
> To: stable at dpdk.org
> Cc: Xueming(Steven) Li <xuemingl at nvidia.com>; dev at dpdk.org; Abhishek
> Marathe <Abhishek.Marathe at microsoft.com>; Ali Alnubani
> <alialnu at nvidia.com>; benjamin.walker at intel.com; David Christensen
> <drc at linux.vnet.ibm.com>; hariprasad.govindharajan at intel.com; Hemant
> Agrawal <hemant.agrawal at nxp.com>; Ian Stokes <ian.stokes at intel.com>;
> Jerin Jacob <jerinj at marvell.com>; John McNamara
> <john.mcnamara at intel.com>; Ju-Hyoung Lee <juhlee at microsoft.com>;
> Kevin Traynor <ktraynor at redhat.com>; Luca Boccassi <bluca at debian.org>;
> Pei Zhang <pezhang at redhat.com>; qian.q.xu at intel.com; Raslan Darawsheh
> <rasland at nvidia.com>; NBU-Contact-Thomas Monjalon (EXTERNAL)
> <thomas at monjalon.net>; yuan.peng at intel.com; zhaoyan.chen at intel.com
> Subject: 20.11.4 patches review and test
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Here is a list of patches targeted for stable release 20.11.4.
> 
> The planned date for the final release is 31th December.
> 
> Please help with testing and validation of your use cases and report
> any issues/results with reply-all to this mail. For the final release
> the fixes and reported validations will be added to the release notes.
> 
> A release candidate tarball can be found at:
> 
>     https://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk-stable/tag/?id=v20.11.4-rc1
> 
> These patches are located at branch 20.11 of dpdk-stable repo:
>     https://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk-stable/
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Xueming Li <xuemingl at nvidia.com>
> 
> ---

The following covers the functional tests that we ran on Mellanox hardware for this release:
- Basic functionality:
  Send and receive multiple types of traffic.
- testpmd xstats counter test.
- testpmd timestamp test.
- Changing/checking link status through testpmd.
- RTE flow tests:
  Items:
  - eth
  - geneve
  - gre
  - gre_key
  - gtp
  - icmp
  - icmp6
  - ipv4
  - ipv6
  - ipv6_frag_ext
  - mark
  - meta
  - mpls
  - nvgre
  - tag
  - tcp
  - udp
  - vlan
  - vxlan
  - vxlan_gpe
  Actions:
  - age (shared and non-shared)
  - count
  - dec_tcp_ack
  - dec_tcp_seq
  - dec_ttl
  - drop
  - flag
  - inc_tcp_ack
  - inc_tcp_seq
  - jump
  - mark
  - queue
  - raw_decap
  - raw_encap
  - rss (shared and non-shared)
  - set_ipv4_dscp
  - set_ipv4_dst
  - set_ipv4_src
  - set_ipv6_dscp
  - set_ipv6_dst
  - set_ipv6_src
  - set_mac_dst
  - set_mac_src
  - set_meta
  - set_tag
  - set_tp_dst
  - set_tp_src
  - set_ttl
  - vxlan_decap
  - vxlan_encap

- Some RSS tests.
- VLAN filtering, stripping and insertion tests.
- Checksum and TSO tests.
- ptype tests.
- link_status_interrupt example application tests.
- l3fwd-power example application tests.
- Multi-process example applications tests.
- Hardware LRO tests.

Functional tests ran on:
- NIC: ConnectX-4 Lx / OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Driver: MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.5-1.0.3.2 / Firmware: 14.32.1010
- NIC: ConnectX-4 Lx / OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Kernel: 5.16.0-rc5 / Driver: rdma-core v38.0 / Firmware: 14.32.1010
- NIC: ConnectX-5 / OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Driver: MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.5-1.0.3.2 / Firmware: 16.32.1010
- NIC: ConnectX-5 / OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Kernel: 5.16.0-rc5 / Driver: v38.0 / Firmware: 16.32.1010
- NIC: ConnectX-6 Dx / OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Driver: MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.5-1.0.3.2 / Firmware: 22.32.1010

Compilation tests with multiple configurations in the following OS/driver combinations are also passing:
- Ubuntu 20.04.3 with MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.5-1.0.3.2.
- Ubuntu 20.04.3 with rdma-core master (c52b43e).
- Ubuntu 20.04.3 with rdma-core v28.0.
- Ubuntu 18.04.6 with rdma-core v17.1.
- Ubuntu 18.04.6 with rdma-core master (c52b43e) (i386).
- Ubuntu 16.04.7 with rdma-core v22.7.
- Fedora 35 with rdma-core v38.0.
- Fedora 36 (Rawhide) with rdma-core v38.0
- CentOS 7 7.9.2009 with rdma-core master (940f53f).
- CentOS 7 7.9.2009 with MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.5-1.0.3.2.
- CentOS 8 8.4.2105 with rdma-core master (940f53f).
- OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 with rdma-core v31.0.
- Windows Server 2019 with Clang 11.0.0.

The only issue we found that was introduced by 20.11.4-rc1 is the following:
- Bug 916 - [20.11.4-rc1][mlx5] 2% single core packet forwarding performance degradation (https://bugs.dpdk.org/show_bug.cgi?id=916)
We are still discussing whether we want to backport a fix to this release or not.

Thanks,
Ali