[dpdk-users] DPDK mlx4 PMD on Azure VM

[Andrew Bainbridge]

Hi Hui

That is very similar to the steps I found I needed to follow.

Another useful fact: I found that sometimes when testpmd gives the, "MR creation failure: Operation not permitted" error, stopping the VM (via the Azure portal) and restarting it fixes it. Someone on the Azure team suggested that this is because of a problem on some VM hosts. Stopping and starting the VM is likely to move it to a new host that might not have the problem. I believe they are working on fixing the bad hosts.

________________________________
From: Hui Ling <kelvin.brookletling at gmail.com>
Sent: 10 April 2018 09:40
To: Stephen Hemminger
Cc: Andrew Bainbridge; users at dpdk.org
Subject: Re: [dpdk-users] DPDK mlx4 PMD on Azure VM

In case anyone else might need.

I solved this issue by installing the mlx4 related libraries from mlxn
ofed source for azure.

1) download source from:

https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mellanox.com%2Fpage%2Ffirmware_table_Microsoft%3Fmtag%3Doem_firmware_download&data=02%7C01%7Candbain%40microsoft.com%7Ca8d12124d8ab49e8bf7508d59ebeacaa%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C636589464133550197&sdata=egGzdWoT9wZ13HRxzjdpBUWYXhA2Mm%2FjR4ARuowevUQ%3D&reserved=0

Note: download the sources (48M), not the others. For some reason,
only the source package works for me.

2) unpack and install
./install.pl --guest --dpdk --upstream-libs

3) after installation completes, run
/etc/init.d/openibd restart

this will insert mlx4 related module into kernels.

After that, build dpdk and run testpmd seems working for me

So not sure what is the deal with the MLNX packages for Azure, but
this seems to be way for me to make it work.

Hope this may help someone else.




On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 11:42 PM, Stephen Hemminger
<stephen at networkplumber.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Jan 2018 11:01:09 +0800
> Hui Ling <kelvin.brookletling at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Stephen,
>>
>> My last VM (DS3 v2, with 4 cores and 16GB memory) is in Canada East
>> and I got AN enabled on my subscription so AN worked just fine.
>>
>> For DPDK, I saw from your slides in DPDK submit last year saying
>> current DPDK solution in Azure needs:
>>
>> 1) Linux kerlnel 4.14
>
> You need transparent bonding support which is in kernel netvsc driver.
> It has been backported to Ubuntu Azure (4.13) package, RHEL 7 and SLES.
>
>
>
>> 2) 8 cores
>>
>> I am not sure if these are must. I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu to 4.14,
>> but then I ran into compilation issues with DPDK 17.11 for MLX4 PMD.
>> So I stayed with older version of kernel for Ubuntu 16.04.
>> With my config of VM, however, I could not get the failsafe.sh I got
>> from MS for azure to work.
>
> The number of cores requirement has been dropped, think it is available
> with 4 now.