Re: Process for adding a new driver?

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>]

18/09/2023 16:36, Honnappa Nagarahalli:
> From: Morten Brørup <mb@smartsharesystems.com>
> > 
> > The process for adding a new library to DPDK is well documented [1].
> > 
> > What is the process for adding a new (NIC) driver?
> > 
> > It seems like the task of reviewing NIC PMDs from vendors other than
> > Broadcom/Intel/Marvell/NVIDIA falls entirely on the next-net tree
> > maintainers, Ferruh and Andrew, which doesn't seem like a reasonable
> > burden.
> > 
> > The Napatech driver is too large for Ferruh to review, which in my opinion [2]
> > is an unreasonable argument for not accepting it.
> > 
> > And the 3SNIC driver got no attention by any reviewers [3]. (Although
> > Stephen did provide some basic feedback after they polled for review.)
> > 
> > Overall, I think we should put much more trust in hardware vendors to
> > provide high quality drivers for their hardware. We want vendors to upstream
> > their drivers, with all the benefits of having the code public. If we make it too
> > difficult, they will simply keep their drivers private instead.
> 
> Difficulty vs quality control? IMO, it is good to add more drivers. May be we need to control quality through testing reports?

There are different kind of quality aspects.
Functional testing is one quality criteria.
Grouping code in something understandable with clear explanations is another one.
Being consistent with the rest of the codebase (design or code style)
may be other quality criteria.

The difficult exercise is to ask the right level of investment from the vendor.
Don't forget that adding a driver is a win-win situation.