On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 1:46 PM Stephen Hemminger < step...@networkplumber.org> wrote:
> Several customers have reported similar issues with how the owned/stack > device model > works in DPDK. With failsafe/tap and VF or netvsc and VF there are DPDK > ports which > are marked as owned and therefore not visible. > > The problem is the application has to guess and workaround these port > values in > the port mask that gets passed in on command line. This means a working > application > has to modify its startup script to run on Azure. Worse the actual port > values > change based on the number of NIC's configured. > > Overall this is a nuisance for users. The whole DPDK port index concept is > a bad > design. In Linux/BSD there is ifindex, but few applications care, they all > use names > which is better. Very very few application care that eth1 is ifindex 4. > > The whole assignment of ports is a mess as well since it is based on probe > order > and that is based on PCI order, and not anything dependable. It gets worse > with > command line arguments, vdev, owned devices etc. > > All I can think of is that: > * DPDK network devices need to have human readable names. current PCI is > not good. > * The names need to be repeatable/persistent. udev names are probably > better than anything so far. > Or bsd style names but they end up being device dependent. > * The API to get from name to port needs to easy to use and the > preferred method. > * All examples and documentation should avoid using port index directly. > You need port for fast rx/tx but setup should be by name. > +1 agree completely
