[dpdk-dev] KNI with multiple kthreads per port

[JP M.]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 9:40 PM, Zhang, Helin <helin.zhang at intel.com> wrote:
>>  * 32-bit (yes, KNI works fine, after a few tweaks hugepage init strategy)
> Interesting! How did you get it works?

In a nutshell: The current (circa r1.8.0) approach does mmap starting
from the bottom of the address space, then does a second round of
mmap, then unmaps the first round. Result is (AFAICT) unnecessarily
wasting much of the address space. I'll try to get my patch cleaned up
and posted in the next several days.

> What do you mean "vEth0_1 cannot be configured"?

The primary KNI device, vEth0_0, has (I forget which) ops defined, but
any secndary KNI devices do not. That said, I now see that once the
latter are brought up, I can set their MAC address. Which turns out to
be important. (see below)

>> Should I be bonding vEth0_0 and vEth0_1?  Because I tried doing so (via sysfs);
>> however, attempts to add either as slaves to bond0 were ignored.
>
> What do you mean bonding here? Basically KNI has no relationship to bonding.

All the same, I figured out what I was doing wrong (user-error on my
part, I think) with regards to bonding (EtherChannel) and am now able
to get multiple vnics to enslave. The catch was that the secondary KNI
devices, after being enslaved, are assigned a random MAC. After doing
so, it is necessary to then manually set their MAC to that of the
primary KNI device.  Thereafter, Rx/Tx are load-balanced as expected.
That assignment of a random MAC to the secondary KNI devices is the
hang-up; not clear whether there's a deliberate reason for that
happening.

 ~jp