Hi, 08/01/2018 14:08, Finn Christensen: > Hi Thomas, > > Thanks for bringing this discussion up again. > > The Napatech PMD is build on top of our proprietary driver. The reason is > basically that we utilize many years of driver development and thus reuses > the FPGA controlling code in the DPDK PMD. The Napatech driver suite is still > closed source. > The current NTNIC PMD dynamically links a Napatech proprietary NTAPI library > to control the FPGA on our NICs. > > We did think of the PMD as being our responsibility to keep updated towards > the Napatech NIC communication, and that we would be engaged and asked to > modify accordingly if changes in DPDK required that (maintainer). > Furthermore, the PMD compiles with no issues, when NTNIC is enabled. > We have plans to write a stand-alone PMD, but this is not a small task to do, > therefore we haven't got to that yet.
This standalone PMD would be open and BSD licensed? > If the DPDK community would accept the dynamic linking to a proprietary > library, from inside our PMD, then it would be great. Dynamic linking is OK. I think we can accept such PMD at the condition that we can build it, meaning we can easily download the build dependencies for free. > Let me know what you think. Or maybe you have ideas to what else we could do > to make it upstream. My thinking is to allow every hardware to have a good DPDK support. Every step in this direction is a progress.
