[dpdk-users] qos_sched in DPDK 17.11.0 fails to initialize mbuf pool

[Dumitrescu, Cristian]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Trick [mailto:ian.trick at multapplied.net]
> Sent: Friday, November 17, 2017 1:24 AM
> To: users at dpdk.org
> Cc: Dumitrescu, Cristian <cristian.dumitrescu at intel.com>
> Subject: qos_sched in DPDK 17.11.0 fails to initialize mbuf pool
> 
> Hi. I'm having an issue starting the qos_sched example program.
> 
> # ./examples/qos_sched/build/qos_sched --no-huge -l 1,2,3 --vdev
> net_af_packet0,iface=eth1 -- --pfc "0,0,2,3" --cfg
> examples/qos_sched/profile_ov.cfg
> 
> EAL: Detected 16 lcore(s)
> EAL: Probing VFIO support...
> EAL: Started without hugepages support, physical addresses not available
> EAL: PCI device 0000:08:00.0 on NUMA socket -1
> EAL:   Invalid NUMA socket, default to 0
> EAL:   probe driver: 8086:10d3 net_e1000_em
> PMD: Initializing pmd_af_packet for net_af_packet0
> PMD: net_af_packet0: AF_PACKET MMAP parameters:
> PMD: net_af_packet0:    block size 4096
> PMD: net_af_packet0:    block count 256
> PMD: net_af_packet0:    frame size 2048
> PMD: net_af_packet0:    frame count 512
> PMD: net_af_packet0: creating AF_PACKET-backed ethdev on numa socket 0
> EAL: Error - exiting with code: 1
>   Cause: Cannot init mbuf pool for socket 0
> 

Personally I never used this application with --no-huge or with AF_PACKET, so I suggest you start from the configuration known to work (as detailed in the Sample App Guide) and then change/add one variable at a time to see which change triggers the mempool issue.

This app needs large amounts of memory for the mempool, as traffic management is buffering lots of packets in lots of queues. Out typical tests are done with 4K pipes/output port (64K queues/output port) so we provision mempool to have 2M buffers for each output port. The size of the mempool is hardcoded in the application. 

> 
> This is version 17.11.0 from the repo. My RTE_TARGET is
> x86_64-native-linuxapp-clang. eth1 is a veth. I've tried running with
> `-m` and using a low value but the issue still happens.
> 
> From what I can tell, rte_pktmbuf_pool_create() is failing and rte_errno
> is set to EINVAL.
> 
> In librte_mempool/rte_mempool.c, the function
> rte_mempool_populate_virt() is succeeding this test and returning -EINVAL:
> 
> 	if (RTE_ALIGN_CEIL(len, pg_sz) != len)
> 		return -EINVAL;
> 
> In that context, len is mz->len, the length of a memzone passed by the
> caller, rte_mempool_populate_default(). Which got it here:
> 
> 	mz = rte_memzone_reserve_aligned(mz_name, size,
> 		mp->socket_id, mz_flags, align);
> 	/* not enough memory, retry with the biggest zone we have */
> 	if (mz == NULL)
> 		mz = rte_memzone_reserve_aligned(mz_name, 0,
> 			mp->socket_id, mz_flags, align);
> 
> This fails the first call, and succeeds the second when it passes 0 as
> the size. memzone_reserve_aligned_thread_unsafe(), in
> librte_eal/common/eal_common_memzone.c, gets the length this way:
> 
> 	requested_len = find_heap_max_free_elem(&socket_id, align);
> 
> So the align value is 4096. But the value returned by
> find_heap_max_free_elem() isn't aligned to that -- I think? Since it
> fails the check later on.
> 
> I'm not sure if this is a thing with my environment where I don't have
> enough memory? (Although I would have expected a different error for
> that.) Or I don't have the right program arguments? Or one of these
> functions isn't doing what it's supposed to?