[dpdk-dev] Decoupling DPDK from EAL

[Jason Vassbender]

Hey,

I guess the main hurdle is that we already have our own multi-threaded
architecture and ways to control thread startup/shutdown, priorities
and affinities and they are all balanced very delicately (our
application is latency sensitive, runs on rt_preempt, boots with
isolcpus, etc). In addition, we are already using the command line to
initialize some of our things, and part of the configuration for the
application does not even come from the command line, but from eg.
XML configuration file over the network. So ideally what I would have
preferred is that EAL initialization could be done by other means (for
example a simple initialization function with a dictionary as to be more
flexible) and thread creation/shutdown could be left to the application
if it so desires, provided it meets the execution conditions expected
by DPDK.

Essentially, at its current state, DPDK offers a complete solution to
your problem including the entire surrounding framework. But for most
big applications they already have their own frameworks in place and
integrating DPDK becomes harder than it should be. So if DPDK
were to be decoupled from EAL, made more modular, and some of the
functions optionally left to applications to provide if they already have
the facilities for them would make integration much easier and more
flexible.

-Jason

On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 10:27 AM, François-Frédéric Ozog <ff at ozog.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just completed such a consulting mission for a customer. They were using
> libpcap as the network back end and the most challenging hurdle was to
> transform a single threaded capture architecture to a multi-threaded one
> with DPDK. The other key take away, is that DPDK capture helps to get only
> 20% of the 20 times performance boost I managed to achieve: most of the
> latency is due to "application" and other internal communication mechanisms.
>
> So I agree that DPDK is not light, but I think most of the power of DPDK
> comes from EAL thread management and "IPC"...
>
> Having said all that, I may have missed a critical point, so, what is the
> specific major hurdle you see in the integration?
>
> François-Frédéric
>
>
>> -----Message d'origine-----
>> De : dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] De la part de Jason Vassbender
>> Envoyé : mardi 3 décembre 2013 22:51
>> À : dev at dpdk.org
>> Objet : [dpdk-dev] Decoupling DPDK from EAL
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am trying to integrate DPDK into an existing application in order to
>> improve packet processing latency, but it is proving rather difficult
>> because of DPDK's dependency on EAL's thread management and bootstrap
>> mechanism. Our application already has its own framework for managing
>> threads and their affinities/priorities, IPC, timers and its own bootstrap
>> mechanism (not necessarily via command line arguments), we wish to
>> integrate DPDK as an alternative network back-end, but it wants to to take
>> over our entire way of doing things.
>>
>> Are there any plans to decouple DPDK's core functionality away from EAL so
>> that it can be more easily integrated into existing applications?
>>
>> -Jason
>