Looking for guidance on handling VMXNET3 drivers

[Patrick Mahan]

All,

I've been help development a DPDK application that (mainly) runs on dedicated 
hardware (i40e NICS), Intel CPUs.  However, we have been asked to see if this can 
be run in the ESXi (VMware) environment.  This seemed fine as we have the VMXNET3 
PMD and aside from some missing features, it seemed to work.

Until we tried to down the port, using rte_eth_dev_set_down() API.  This API is 
returning -95 (EOPNOTSUPP) which I take to mean that its link state cannot be 
changed.

I checked the PMD documentation for this driver and cannot find any mention that 
this is a limitation.

I've never looked at the linux implementation (which our older, pre-DPDK) uses 
but it allows the interface to be marked down.

Is my only work-around to stop the device instead?

Thanks for any wisdom...

Patrick Mahan