Agree that the patch sets are a step towards fixing that, but there is a lot more to be done on this. Could we start discussion on what the "ideal" abstraction should be? I'd like to pool those into a formal proposal that we can discuss and drive through a series of patches to make that happen. Even semi-freezing anything prior to that would be premature.
-Venky -----Original Message----- From: dev [mailto:dev-boun...@dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Neil Horman Sent: Friday, April 11, 2014 10:47 AM To: Stephen Hemminger Cc: dev at dpdk.org Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] Poor device abstraction's On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 10:33:31AM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > One of my pet peeve's is that the device driver config does not > abstract the properties of the Ethernet device. The existing > parameters match those of Intel's Ethernet hardware but not much else. > It also makes it hard to write generic applications. If the > application has to query the device driver name string and insert > different parameters for igb, igbvf, ixgbe and vmxnet3 then the API was > designed wrong. > I agree. I think the patches that recently got integrated from Olivier are a step toward fixing that, but theres some more work to be done. Neil > Specific examples: > * the "descriptors" argument to rx/tx is interpreted as a hardware resource > not the number of packets. An application really wants to say "you may > buffer > up to 100us of packets" not have to guess what the underlying driver does. > > * the rthresh/wthresh/pthresh are PCI device artifacts and correct value is > different for each HW device shouldn't be exposed to application. The API > should be something like "device may burst up to N packets and/or T > latency". > > These seems like issues of a transition from a cool toy to talk to > Intel hardware to a useful application infrastructure. > > That is why I would hate to see the existing Intel device centric API frozen. >
