Hi Bruce, > > > I have a number of NIC ports which were working correctly yesterday > > > and are bound correctly to the igb_uio driver - and I want to keep > > > using them through the igb_uio driver for now, not vfio. However, > > > whenever I run a dpdk application today, I find that the vfio kernel > > > module is getting loaded each time - even after I manually remove > > > it, and verify that it has been removed by checking lsmod. Is this > > > expected? If so, why are we loading the vfio driver when I just want to > continue using igb_uio which works fine? > > > > Can you elaborate a bit on what do you mean by "loading vfio driver"? > > Do you mean the vfio-pci kernel gets loaded by DPDK? I certainly > > didn't put in any code that would automatically load that driver, and > certainly not binding devices to it. > > The kernel module called just "vfio" is constantly getting reloaded, and there > is always a "/dev/vfio" directory, which triggers the vfio code handling every > time I run dpdk.
I can't reproduce this. Please note that VFIO actually consists of three drivers (on an x86 system, that is) - vfio (the core VFIO infrastructure such as containers), vfio_iommu_type1 (support for x86-style IOMMU) and vfio-pci (the generic PCI driver). I have unloaded all three and ran dpdk_nic_bind and testpmd - it worked fine and no VFIO kernel drivers were loaded as a result. Best regards, Anatoly Burakov DPDK SW Engineer
