Re: [PATCH v3 5/7] Section 5: Appendix

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2023 at 08:28:55PM -0500, Dave Young wrote:
>    Bruce,
>    Is the following Linux update correct per your feedback?
>    Linux
>    -----
>    To run DPDK applications without root privileges on Linux, perform the
>    following steps:
>    1. **Create a DPDK User Group**: Create a new user group for DPDK and
>    add the desired user to this group.
>    2. **Set Up Hugepages**: Configure hugepages for the user.
>    3. **Bind the NIC to a User-Space Driver**: Use the DPDK tool
>    ``dpdk-devbind.py`` to bind the NIC to a user-space driver like
>    ``vfio-pci`` or ``igb_uio``

These three steps don't need to be covered in the docs. We already
described elsewhere about configuring hugepages and binding the device.
Also, to run as non-root, I would expect there to be a user a/c already
available on the system that the deployer of the app wants to use.

>    4. **Adjust Permissions for Specific Files and Directories**:
> 
>       - VFIO entries in ``/dev``, such as ``/dev/vfio/<id>``, where <id>
>    is the VFIO group to which a device used by DPDK belongs.
>       - The hugepage mount directory, typically ``/dev/hugepages`` on many
>    distributions, or any alternative mount point configured by the user,
>    e.g., ``/mnt/huge``, ``/mnt/huge_1G``.
>       Note: Running DPDK as non-root on Linux requires IOMMU support
>    through vfio.

This note needs to be explicitly called out to the top of the instructions.

The list of files to change the permissions on is key. The action -
changing permissions - is common between Linux and BSD, but the specific
files to adjust will be different.

>    5. **Run the DPDK Application**: Run the desired DPDK application as
>    the user who has been added to the DPDK group.
>    FreeBSD
>    -------
>    - The userspace-io device files in ``/dev``, for example,
>    ``/dev/uio0``, ``/dev/uio1``, and so on
>    - The userspace contiguous memory device: ``/dev/contigmem``

Regards,
/Bruce