[dpdk-dev] RTE_EAL on single core CPUs

[Richardson, Bruce]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Marc Sune
> Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 1:51 PM
> To: <dev at dpdk.org>
> Subject: [dpdk-dev] RTE_EAL on single core CPUs
>
> Dear all,
>
> I was preparing a development machine (kvm - qemu) with a single core, and stumbled with 
> what appears to be a limitation with EAL [1]. 
> The VM is setup emulating a SandyBridge CPU but with a single CPU and running
> 1.6.0 branch HEAD (perhaps this is the problem?¿).
>
> I was also interested in this particular setup, because we haven't yet tried our application 
> with some Atom equipment we have here, but we need to make it run also there.
>
> Any ideas? I am probably missing something really fundamental here.

Hi Marc,

I think in your case you've hit more a limitation of the particular app, rather than one for the EAL. L2fwd requires more than a single core to run, but you can easily write applications that can handle packets from multiple ports using a single core. 
Where you may hit issues, though, is that you cannot isolate the single core cpu from the linux kernel, so you may need to ensure you have enough buffering throughout the app to avoid packet loss when the kernel interrupts you to do its own house-keeping tasks.

Regards,
/Bruce