Added dev group.

On Tue, Dec 9, 2025 at 10:11 PM narsimharaj pentam <pnarsimharaj@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi 

I have a query related to ip fragmentation handling in DPDK.

The DPDK application is trying to send a larger packet than the configured MTU on the interface, before sending the packet to the  i40e PMD the packet will
undergo fragmentation . The DPDK library function "rte_ipv4_fragment_packet" is used for fragmentation. Function rte_ipv4_fragment_packet will create
direct and indirect mbuf's  for a fragment , the indirect buffers will have reference to the mbuf of the actual packet (zero copy).

The application will call function rte_eth_tx_burst to transmit fragments , which internally invokes i40e_xmit_pkts , the question here  is when should main application
mbuf should be freed , can It be freed immediately  after i40e_xmit_pkts returns success, not sure because the mbuf's are queued up in software ring before actual transmit, 
I am worried about the fragments holding references to the main application buffer.

Thanks.

BR
Narsimha