DPDK TM Capabilities

[Ertza]

Hi all, when checking for QoS traffic management and traffic shaping capabilities of ConnectX-6 NICs, we can usually run the DPDK’s own testpmd application and get a result of the port’s capabilities usually like:
testpmd> show port tm cap 0

and it should return a list of supported capabilities and max values etc., however on my TACC slice when I run this command in VM I get cause unspecified: Function not implemented (error 1).

Is it because of using a shared NIC? How can I request a dedicated NIC while creating a VM and any idea if that would solve the issue?

[Ertza]

It seems I would need the SmartNIC tag to provision a VM with SmartNIC for my project. Can you guys kindly help with that? Thank you.

[Ilya Baldin]

Ertza,
I know for a fact we have folks using DPDK on the testbed with all three NIC types:

• All three NIC models are compatible with DPDK in PCI mode (PCI mode is the most efficient one).
• The default_ubuntu_22 OS image comes with linux-image-virtual kernel package that lacks mlx5_ib kernel module. DPDK cannot initialize the NIC without this kernel model. The solution is installing linux-image-generic kernel package.

If you want SmartNIC, please have you or one of the project owners fill out a request for permissions to get SmartNICs. This is in the Portal project view.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Ilya Baldin.

[yoursunny]

Ilya Baldin wrote:

I know for a fact we have folks using DPDK on the testbed with all three NIC types

Yeah, that’s me.
All three NIC types can support most DPDK features, but for NIC_Basic you must use the assigned MAC address and cannot use other MAC addresses.

You would need linux-image-generic for the kernel module and libibverbs-dev to enable DPDK net_mlx5 driver.
In FABlib script, you can insert this step, after slice.submit() and before building DPDK:

execute_threads = {}
for node in slice.get_nodes():
    execute_threads[node] = node.execute_thread(f'''
        sudo apt update
        sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt full-upgrade -y
        sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt install -y –no-install-recommends libibverbs-dev linux-image-generic jq
        sudo reboot
    ''')
for thread in execute_threads.values():
    thread.result()
slice.wait_ssh(progress=True)

[Ertza]

Hi Ilya, thanks for the reply, my question was not about using/installing DPDK, but rather a specific set of capabilities that come with the DPDK enabled NIC. Turns out that mellanox does not infact implement these capabilities (QoS traffic management and traffic shaping) that I was wondering about and hence I was getting the error. On my local setup I had Intel’s smart NICs which had these capabilities.

I’ll fill out the request form too if required, thanks for guiding me about that.

[Ertza]

@Yoursunny thank you, but again running DPDK was never an issue. I was in-fact one of the first persons to run DPDK in Fabric environments and wrote a tutorial on Paul’s request containing instructions and a template Jupyter notebook on setting up and configuring DPDK in Fabric slices for future users.

The issue was something else and it turned out to be a lack of feature in Mellanox NICs/drivers itself.

[Khawar Shehzad]

@Ertza I’m trying to find the jupyter notebook containing the setup and configuring DPDK but I did not see it anywhere. Maybe I’ve overlooked or am looking at the wrong place. Would you mind sharing the link to the notebook here ?

Thanks

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