Bug 590

Summary: Transmit errors with i40e VF using SR-IOV on a vSphere VM
Product: DPDK Reporter: Christopher Swindle (christopher.swindle)
Component: ethdevAssignee: jeffguo (jia.guo)
Status: UNCONFIRMED ---    
Severity: normal CC: ajit.khaparde, jia.guo, murphyx.yang
Priority: Normal    
Version: 20.11   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86   
OS: Linux   

Description Christopher Swindle 2020-12-04 03:04:39 CET 
Overview:
I am trying to make use of DPDK with an XXV710 VF using SR-IOV on a vSphere VM, however I am finding that with DPDK 20.11 that I am unable to transmit any packets in my application. When running testpmd I find that there are no packets transmitted and the tx-error stat just keeps getting incremented when a packet is transmitted.

I did some further testing of different DPDK versions and found that the following commit is the one that stopped these cards working in a vSphere VM:

https://github.com/DPDK/dpdk/commit/34283fc94847f237677edd5909639503c605daeb

When I revert this commit I find that i40e VFs on vSphere do work with DPDK 20.11.

Steps to Reproduce:
This can be reproduced with the following steps:
- Add an XXV710 VF SR-IOV interface to a vSphere VM
- Use testpmd to transmit packets on the vSphere VM (I used `testpmd -l 2,4,6 -- --stats-period=5 --forward-mode=mac --port-topology=loop`)

Actual Results:
The tx-error stats are incremented and no packets are transmitted.

Expected Results:
The packets should be transmitted.
Comment 1 murphy 2020-12-30 09:07:44 CET 
Can you test this case on other host? (e.g.: ubuntu or centos)
Comment 2 Ajit Khaparde 2021-02-17 17:37:54 CET 
Christopher, did you try the Murphy's suggestion?
Comment 3 Christopher Swindle 2021-02-17 17:40:03 CET 
No, as I do not have easy access to other hosts.
Comment 4 Ajit Khaparde 2021-02-17 17:42:57 CET 
Jeff, Can you take a look at this? Thanks