[dpdk-users] DPDK-20.11 and HUGEPAGES

[Templin (US), Fred L]

Hi, I have a test environment based on RHEL VMs that are run from a hypervisor
that I have no administrative or physical access to. My only administrative control
is by ssh into the running VMs over the network where at least I have sudo access.

When I run my DPDK-20.11 application, it crashes because hugepages are not
configured. So, I allocated 2MB hugepages at runtime but the app still crashes
because there are no 1GB hugepages which on RHEL can only be set at boot time.

I found instructions for setting RHEL boot parameters that will allocate 1GB
hugepages at boot time, but I have not tried it because I am concerned that
if I mess something up and reboot the VM it may never come back.

So, I am wondering if DPDK-20.11 supports a "semi-huge" mode of operation
that allows it to run with only 2MB hugepages configured and no 1GB pages?
If so, what would be the way to set that up?

I have also tried invoking DPDK with "--no-huge". My application starts fine,
but at runtime it crashes out of a DPDK API call while processing an mbuf
for a received packet. I can give more details about this if there is a chance
it could be debugged - or, is "--no-huge" problematic in general?

Thanks - Fred