Hi all,

At startup, the DPDK plugin attempts to take over most PCI network devices
which are supported by a PMD and are not in use by the kernel. It seems
that vmxnet3 is an exception to this - if vmxnet3 devices are present, they
are blacklisted unless they were explicitly whitelisted in  startup.conf. I
presume that this is so you could use the vmxnet3 plugin to manage those
devices.

Would it be acceptable to have the DPDK plugin treat vmxnet3 like other
device types unless it's explicitly blacklisted? We use VPP on various
platforms with different types of physical and virtual NICs. Since we don't
know at build time how many interfaces will be attached to a VM or what all
of the PCI addresses of those devices will be, it's hard to package a
default startup.conf that whitelists the right device IDs for a given VM.
The default behavior of the DPDK plugin has been very useful because it
usually makes all of the available interfaces manageable when a new VM is
brought up. In order to make vmxnet3 interfaces manageable on a newly
created VM, we would need to run something at startup to figure out which
vxmnet3 devices are available and explicitly whitelist them in the DPDK
plugin configuration or to set them up to be managed by the vmxnet3 plugin.
This is certainly possible, but it would be nice if we could avoid the
extra complication and have vmxnet3 devices behave like other devices.

If we submitted a patch that removed the auto-blacklisting of vmxnet3,
would there be any objections to that?

Thanks,
-Matt
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.

View/Reply Online (#12459): https://lists.fd.io/g/vpp-dev/message/12459
Mute This Topic: https://lists.fd.io/mt/30299692/21656
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://lists.fd.io/g/vpp-dev/unsub  [[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Reply via email to