Re: [dpdk-dev] Napatech pmd

[Finn Christensen <fc@napatech.com>]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Thomas Monjalon [mailto:thomas@monjalon.net]
>Sent: 8. januar 2018 16:16
>To: Finn Christensen <fc@napatech.com>
>Cc: dev@dpdk.org
>Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] Napatech pmd
>
>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?

Yes!

>
>> 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.

That sounds great. This was also our initial thoughts about the implementation.
I will try to start this task up again and next step, I guess, will be a new RFC for a
new Napatech pmd.

>
>> 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.

Thanks,
Finn