[dpdk-dev] Userspace testing

[Burakov, Anatoly]

On 29-Jul-20 3:34 PM, Owen Hilyard wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I was wondering what everyone's thoughts on doing both userspace testing
> and unprivileged testing of dpdk applications is. DTS currently runs all
> commands on the tester and the dut as the root user. Please correct me if
> I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption that most applications written
> with dpdk would not run as root. This could present a problem since it is
> possible that permissions errors could arise and we wouldn't notice it due
> to the way we currently test. Given that, I was wondering what should and
> should not be possible as a normal (non-root) user, and what would be the
> best way to go about verifying this.
> 
> Thanks
> 

This is useful, but not everything is supposed to work with limited 
privileges. Things that definitely *won't* work are KNI and anything 
igb_uio-related. Everything VFIO should work fine, and setting up 
correct permissions for hugepages and VFIO is one of the trickier things 
that even I don't know how to do correctly off the top of my head :D

An easy stopgap way of running almost everything as an unprivileged user 
is to use in-memory mode (--in-memory EAL switch); this will cause EAL 
to reserve hugepages etc. without touching the filesystem, sacrificing 
secondary process support in the process (so e.g. EAL autotest won't 
work in --in-memory mode as it relies on secondary process support).

So, i would say that it would be a valuable thing to test for, but be 
aware that not everything is expected to work.

-- 
Thanks,
Anatoly