Re: [dpdk-dev] Napatech pmd

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>]

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.