On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 8:38 PM, Ed Warnicke <hagb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Currently working on leveraging MLX5 drivers in VPP which requires
> activating the PMD at DPDK compilation?
>
>
>
> Is it something that can be done through the VPP build process (e.g.
> tweaking with DPDK .config file)?
>
>
>
> Making it part of the default binary package?
>


Speaking for .deb packaging:
The basic DPDK compile time config option(s) are documented in
http://dpdk.org/doc/guides-16.04/nics/mlx5.html
>From a deb_dpdk POV enabling that would be easy - there is a part in
debian/rules that makes changes to the default config as it comes from
dpdk.org, see here
<https://gerrit.fd.io/r/gitweb?p=deb_dpdk.git;a=blob;f=debian/rules;h=e8bf409dc3693c3c817351df65ec16aee9ba2900;hb=HEAD#l44>
:

But there is something that makes this hard which is not just the compile
option.
It also will need libibverbs - that alone would be ok since it is around in
Debian and Ubuntu.
But the MLX drivers in DPDK need the special Mellanox version of it: MLX
special
<http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=26&mtag=linux_sw_drivers>
vs Standard <https://www.openfabrics.org/downloads/libibverbs/> libs.
Now Distributions usually carry the open standard libs and the DPDK MLX
drivers won't build against these.

Last time I tried to build against the open lib I got a build fail as
expected.
<https://launchpadlibrarian.net/281700914/buildlog_ubuntu-yakkety-ppc64el.dpdk_16.07-0ubuntu3~dev02_BUILDING.txt.gz>
The problem with that is the slow pushing of changes into the openfabrics
libibverbs.
But dependencies rather often e.g. from dpdk are against most recent stuff
that is not in the open version.

If you are just building for your own you might be fine - get your MLX_OFED
and build it.
But for enabling by default in Distributions we would require them to be
compatible with the public open libibverbs - which means either slow down
dpdk-mlx devel to use what is there or speed up libibverbs contributions
which neither of us can control.


-- 
Christian Ehrhardt
Software Engineer, Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd
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