[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] ethdev: fix statistics description

Morten Brørup mb at smartsharesystems.com
Thu Nov 3 10:07:19 CET 2016


> -----Original Message-----
> From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Remy Horton
> Sent: Thursday, November 3, 2016 3:01 AM
> 
> On 02/11/2016 17:07, Mcnamara, John wrote:
> [..]
> > Perhaps we could an API that returns a struct, or otherwise, that
> > indicated what stats are returned by a PMD. An application that
> > required stats could call it once to establish what stats were
> > available. It would have to be done in some way that wouldn't break
> > ABI every time a new stat was added.
> >
> > Harry, Remy, how would this fit in with the existing stats scheme or
> > the new metrics library.
> 
> At the moment xstats (rte_eth_xstats_get()) pulls stuff out of
> rte_eth_stats and reports them unconditionally alongside all the
> driver-specific xstats. This could change so that it only reports the
> (legacy) stats the PMDs actually fills in.
> 
> Personally in the longer term I think xstats should get all the info it
> requires directly rather than relying on the legacy stats for some of
> its info, but that would involve pushing a lot of common code into the
> PMDs..
> 
> ..Remy

Adding eth_stats to eth_xstats or not is not important - it's not a synchronized snapshot of the entire counter set, just a question of calling one or two functions to obtain the values.

Regarding eth_xstats, I would dare to say that the NIC HW designers chose their statistics counters wisely, based on a combination of industry standards (e.g. common SNMP MIBs, such as the Interfaces MIB and etherStats) and customer feedback, so the hardware counters are probably useful to a DPDK application, and thus it makes sense to expose them directly. The application can transform them into industry standard counter sets (IF-MIB, etherStats, etc.) if required. DPDK could offer a common library for this transformation.

-Morten


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