Daniel, On 16/05/14 22:16, daniel chapiesky wrote: > We are interested in finding out how much we can decrease the attack surface > of our application by going full bare metal.. (i.e. sans OS). The mention > of a bare metal version of dpdk is one of the contributing factors for our > working on our prototype. > > Can you please provide any information on the dpdk bare metal version? > Such as:
I don't know about _the_ bare metal version, but if I'm allowed to advertise a project I'm working on, I'll mention _a_ potential bare metal version: The goal of rump kernels (http://rumpkernel.org/) is to provide an OS quality driver stack without the OS (hence *rump* kernels). The TCP/IP stack provided by rump kernels already integrates with DPDK, and many existing POSIX-y apps "just work" on top of rump kernels in an OS-less environment. It's no stretch to imagine DPDK running on a bare metal rump kernel platform, TCP/IP optional. > 1) is it in fact - a zero OS version or is it based on a RTOS such as > those from Wind River. > > 2) Does the bare metal version only support one kind of processor family > such > as i7, or is it possible to target atom or arm with it as well? > > 3) what are the licensing terms for it? > > 4) are royalties required? Rump kernels are [based on] NetBSD, so there's support for a variety of architectures, including Intel, ARM, MIPS, etc. Everything is open source and BSD-licensed, no royalties. However, since the idea of the open source project is to provide a driver stack instead of ready-baked solutions, you have to write (or copypaste) the lowest bootstrap/machine layer yourself (*). The good news is that, speaking from experience, the required lowlevel support is a simple few-nighter. - antti *) feel free to call that development investment a licensing fee if it translates better to your finance department
