Trouble using PCI drivers for DPDK

[Sam Zhu]

Hi! I’m trying to enable a DPDK PCI driver on a SmartNIC in FABRIC, but I feel like I’m running up against a wall.

For context, I’m trying to get NDN-DPDK running on FABRIC by following the docs (https://github.com/usnistgov/ndn-dpdk/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md, which are quite thorough, thanks @yoursunny!). I’ve been able to enable some XDP drivers for the basic NICs, but performance is way below what I’m expecting (200ms to transfer a 500kb file), so I’m trying to use the PCI drivers instead!

However, it seems that the drivers refuse to attach the device:

I looked at the following thread for some advice: https://learn.fabric-testbed.net/forums/topic/dpdk-tm-capabilities/#post-3497 , and tried installing those dependencies, but they didn’t seem to help. In addition, I looked into trying to install the NVIDIA MLX5 driver, but once it was installed, it didn’t seem to help: https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/platform/mlx5.html

Here’s the notebook I’ve been creating:

https://github.com/sjzhu/ndn-fabric-poc/blob/main/ndn-poc.ipynb

I feel like there’s some misunderstanding I’m running into about how I’m supposed to interact with the SmartNICs in order to enable them for DPDK, given the success others seemed to have on these forums. Do I need some different permission on my project to interact with them more deeply? Do I need to fiddle with some deeper driver settings?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Sam

[Sam Zhu]

Larger images since the previous post seems to have shrunk them:

[Sam Zhu]

This has been resolved! I was simply not activating a forwarder role for NDN-DPDK. Oops.

If anyone from the future finds this via search, make sure you actually follow the docs.

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