Determining vendor and model from the port ID

[Slava Ovsiienko]

Hi, Lukas

Some older NICs (depending on HW generation and on FW configuration) may require
the packet data to be inline (incapsulated) into the WQE (hardware descriptor of the Tx queue)
to allow some steering engine features work correctly. The minimal number of bytes to be inline
is obtained by DPDK from FW (it reports the needed L2/L3/L4/tunnel headers and mlx5 PMD
calculates the size in bytes), and the minimal is 18B (if any).

Then, the Tx queue has absolute limitation for number of descriptors, for CX4/5/6/7 it is 32K
(typical value, also queried from FW (dev_cap.max_qp_wr). Application also asks for the given
Tx queue capacity, specifying the number of abstract descriptor, to make sure Tx queue can store
the given number of packets. For the maximal allowed queue size the txq_calc_inline_max()
routine returns 12B (MLX5_DSEG_MIN_INLINE_SIZE). This is the maximal number of inline bytes
to keep WQE size small enough and guarantee the requested number of WQEs within queue
of limited size.

So, it seems ConnectX-4 on your site requires 18B of inline data, but for the maximal queue size
the WQE size is 64B and we can inline only 12B. The good news is that txq_calc_inline_max()
estimation is too conservative, and in this reality we can inline 18B. I think we can replace the 
MLX5_DSEG_MIN_INLINE_SIZE with MLX5_ESEG_MIN_INLINE_SIZE in the txq_calc_inline_max()
and try. Could you, please ?

diff --git a/drivers/net/mlx5/mlx5_txq.c b/drivers/net/mlx5/mlx5_txq.c
index 3e93517323..1913094e5c 100644
--- a/drivers/net/mlx5/mlx5_txq.c
+++ b/drivers/net/mlx5/mlx5_txq.c
@@ -739,7 +739,7 @@ txq_calc_inline_max(struct mlx5_txq_ctrl *txq_ctrl)
                   MLX5_WQE_ESEG_SIZE -
                   MLX5_WSEG_SIZE -
                   MLX5_WSEG_SIZE +
-                  MLX5_DSEG_MIN_INLINE_SIZE;
+                  MLX5_ESEG_MIN_INLINE_SIZE;
        return wqe_size;
 }

With best regards,
Slava



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lukáš Šišmiš <sismis at cesnet.cz>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2025 3:33 PM
> To: users at dpdk.org; Dariusz Sosnowski <dsosnowski at nvidia.com>; Slava
> Ovsiienko <viacheslavo at nvidia.com>
> Subject: Determining vendor and model from the port ID
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I am trying to determine what is the vendor and model of the port ID
> that I am interacting with but all references lead me to an obsolete API.
> 
> The goal is to execute specific code only when I am dealing with
> Mellanox ConnectX-4-family cards. Longer explanation below.
> 
> I would like to access "struct rte_pci_id" but it always seems hidden
> only on the driver level.
> 
> Is there any way how to approach this?
> 
> 
> Longer explanation of the problem:
> 
> In https://github.com/OISF/suricata/pull/12654 I am using dev_info to
> get the maximum number of allowed TX descriptors for the port that is
> advertised by the PMD. But when I set the actual number of TX
> descriptors then the driver complains "minimal data inline requirements
> (18) are not satisfied (12) on port 0, try the smaller Tx queue size
> (32768)". However, this problem occurs only on ConnectX-4 family and not
> on CX5/6/7 (that's why I cannot limit this to just mlx5 PMD).
> 
> Alternatively, can this be fixed/addressed directly in the MLX5 PMD?
> MLX5 PMD needs to advertise 16384 TX descriptors as the maximum only for
> ConnectX-4 family.
> (Putting Darius, Viacheslav in the loop, please reassign if needed)
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Lukas