[dpdk-users] TestPMD fails with DPDK 16.07 + VMware Direct I/o Passthrough of X520-SR2 NICs

[Sruthi Yellamraju]

Hi,

I have 2 10G X520-SR2 Ethernet adapters that i want to use in a VM with
DPDK. So, I configured using VMware vSphere these two PCI devices to be in
Passthrough (Direct I/o not SR-IOV) mode and attached these 2 I/fs to the
VM instance.

On the VM instance, the 2 PCI devices do show up ok (lspci and ethtool
showing driver info below). The X520-SR2 adapters came up with ixgbe driver
on the guest kernel. I am able to attach the I/f to DPDK using dpdk-devbind
and to use igb_uio. However testpmd application fails to recognize the
interface. Any ideas why?

I saw a couple of links showing that there could be timing issues with
ixgbe in earlier releases of dpdk, that could lead to such an issue, Is
this the case even now?

http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2014-January/001205.html
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/release-notes/dpdk-release-notes.pdf
- Section 7.11

Any pointers would be really helpful. Is DPDK expected to work on VM
without SR_IOV as well?

Some info below:

# dpdk-devbind -b igb_uio 0000:1b:00.1
# dpdk-devbind --status

Network devices using DPDK-compatible driver
============================================
0000:1b:00.1 'Ethernet Server Bypass Adapter X520-SR2' drv=igb_uio
unused=ixgbe

Network devices using kernel driver
===================================
0000:02:01.0 '82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper)' if=eth1
drv=e1000 unused=igb_uio
0000:0b:00.0 'VMXNET3 Ethernet Controller' if=eth0 drv=vmxnet3
unused=igb_uio *Active*
0000:13:00.0 'VMXNET3 Ethernet Controller' if=eth2 drv=vmxnet3
unused=igb_uio
0000:1b:00.0 'Ethernet Server Bypass Adapter X520-SR2' if=eth3 drv=ixgbe
unused=igb_uio

Other network devices
=====================
<none>

# testpmd -w 0000:1b:00.1
EAL: Detected 14 lcore(s)
PMD: bnxt_rte_pmd_init() called for (null)
EAL: No probed ethernet devices

# lspci | grep -i ethernet
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet
Controller (Copper) (rev 01)
0b:00.0 Ethernet controller: VMware VMXNET3 Ethernet Controller (rev 01)
13:00.0 Ethernet controller: VMware VMXNET3 Ethernet Controller (rev 01)
1b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Server Bypass
Adapter X520-SR2 (rev 01)
1b:00.1 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Server Bypass
Adapter X520-SR2 (rev 01)
[root@


# ethtool -i eth4
driver: ixgbe
version: 3.13.0.14-bypass-BYPASS-PFNIC
firmware-version: 0x8000053e
bus-info: 0000:1b:00.1
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no