[dpdk-dev] Napatech pmd

[Neil Horman]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 10:07:12PM +0200, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> 31/03/2020 21:56, Neil Horman:
> > On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 02:29:08PM +0200, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> > > 31/03/2020 14:17, Neil Horman:
> > > > On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 01:25:25PM +0200, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> > > > > Hi,
> > > > > 
> > > > > Raising this topic again.
> > > > > 
> > > > > As said in the past, it is better to have this PMD inside DPDK.
> > > > > We discussed some concerns, but I think the consensus was to integrate
> > > > > Napatech PMD anyway.
> > > > > 
> > > > > I am sad that you did not feel welcome enough to follow up with patches
> > > > > during all these years.
> > > > > Please would you like to restart the upstreaming process?
> > > > > 
> > > > Whats changed here?
> > > 
> > > Nothing changed, except years.
> > > 
> > > > I still don't see what the advantage is to accepting this code in the DPDK tree.
> > > > No one will be able to use it without accepting Napatechs license for their
> > > > underlying library.  As such, the code can't really be maintained at all by
> > > > anyone other than Napatech in the community, and so may as well just be
> > > > maintained as an out of tree driver.
> > > 
> > > You are the only one having this concern.
> > I don't think its wise to assume that silence implies acceptance.
> > 
> > > Nobody from the Technical Board looks to be against the acceptance.
> > > 
> > > The advantage is simple: Napatech customers will be able to run any DPDK version.
> > Why is that not possible by having napatech maintain an out-of-tree PMD?  Theres
> > no reason that can't be done.
> 
> They are maintaining an out-of-tree PMD:
> 	https://github.com/napatech/dpdk/releases
> 
> I'm just trying to improve the situation, avoiding DPDK forks.
The threat of forks is overstated.  No single vendor is going to throw the
resources needed to properly maintain the full dpdk release just so they can get
their one driver into the same tree.

Also, I'm not sure if this helps, but the approach being taken in the napatech
tree is fairly heavyweight.  Instead of cloning the entire dpdk tree, they could
just be maintaining the drivers/net/napatech directory, with build instructions
indicating that a user should clone and build dpdk, then build their tree, after
setting RTE_SDK/RTE_SRCDIR/etc appropriately.