On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 12:29:21PM +0100, David Marchand wrote: > Some applications use port hotplug as their primary way for using DPDK > resources. > Having a systematic device probing is a problem when not all available > resources will be used by the application, as such applications won't set > an explicit allow list at startup. > > This is the case for OVS on systems with multiple mlx5 devices: > one device can be used by the kernel while the other(s) are used by DPDK. > In such a setup, the kernel used device may get reconfigured in > unexpected ways and trigger issues like the one described by Kevin > not so long ago in bugzilla 1873. > > Add an EAL option to disable device probing, allowing to select per bus. > > Note: the current implementation does not take combinations of the new > option with -a/-b. > > Signed-off-by: David Marchand <[email protected]> > --- Wondering about this problem and fix options. Rather than a new flag for no-probe, would an alternative flag to switch the default mode from block-listing to allow-listing work?
Right now, by default, EAL probes all buses and tries to take all non-blocklisted devices. We could add a flag to switch that so that we allow-list by default, which I think should have the same effect as this if no -a flags are passed. We already have support for managing -a and -b flag interactions, which should make interacting with the new flag easier. WDYT? /Bruce
