[dpdk-dev] [PATCH 00/17] Enhance mlx5 with Mellanox OFED 3.1

[Joongi Kim]

My laboratory (an.kaist.ac.kr) had tried to build a native kernel driver
for mlx4 a few months ago, and sent the full patch to the patchwork system:
http://dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/6128/
This driver supports only minimal RX/TX of packets, and many standard
features such as VLAN are missing.

The major technical difficulty was to make a memory region that is
persistent even when the user process terminates. We have sent another
patch for this: http://dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/6127/

Nonetheless, we abandoned this approach, because the new mlx4 PMD based on
OFED 3.0 performed almost same or better than our native driver with an
almost complete feature set. Still, I believe that there are rooms to
improve/optimize the native driver but we just do not have enough human
resources for that.
In background, we tried to publish a academic paper about an automated
convertor from Linux NIC drivers to DPDK poll-mode drivers, but
unfortunately this project is being hold back now.

Regards,
Joongi

2015년 10월 6일 (화) 오후 5:54, Stephen Hemminger <stephen at networkplumber.org>님이
작성:

> On Mon,  5 Oct 2015 19:54:35 +0200
> Adrien Mazarguil <adrien.mazarguil at 6wind.com> wrote:
>
> > Mellanox OFED 3.1 [1] comes with improved APIs that Mellanox ConnectX-4
> > (mlx5) adapters can take advantage of, such as:
> >
> > - Separate post and doorbell operations on all queues.
> > - Lightweight RX queues called Work Queues (WQs).
> > - Low-level RSS indirection table and hash key configuration.
> >
> > This patchset enhances mlx5 with all of these for better performance and
> > flexibility. Documentation is updated accordingly.
>
> Has anybody explored doing a driver without the dependency on OFED?
> It is certainly possible. The Linux kernel drivers don't depend on it.
> And dropping OFED would certainly be faster.
>