Tim and DPDK Lab Group,
Atomic Rules is a new DPDK/LF Member and is interested in participating in and contributing to the DPDK Lab effort. For over a year, about five engineers have been working to develop our Arkville product which will be announced publicly next month following 17.05. The elevator-pitch for Arkville is that it is a FPGA/GPP AXI/DPDK packet conduit. It is by design, line-rate and feature-agnostic. You can think of it as barebones FPGA-based NIC without any specific MAC. There is a blog post here:
http://atomicrules.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-road-to-arkville.htmlMonths ago we began to use DPDK/DTS as our testing regime. Then, as now, we require objective measures for correctness, throughput, and latency in our CI regression loop. We spent several frustrating months doing the following: Buy a bunch of Fortville/XL710s and servers; set up DTS and understand it; reach a baseline that shows out-of-the-box Fortville/XL710 performance. Instrument everything. Then; replace the Fortville DUT NIC with a work-alike Arkville DUT NIC and note the differences. This has not gone as smoothly as planned; as the DTS code is quite brittle to exact system configuration (e.g. numa zones and processor selection). We have learned from this and even built our own 4 x 100GbE Trex-ready packet player. (Thanks Cisco and Hanoch Haim)
http://atomicrules.blogspot.com/2017/01/paced-packet-player.htmlThis work remains incomplete and stalled on several technical fronts.
Still, this is "toy" up against what this group is considering. I'm not sure that Atomic Rules has the resources to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the giants in this group. But we are terrifically interested in finding a way to get the vital DPDK correctness, throughput, and latency measures we seek. We are located 40 minutes from the UNH IOL in Durham, NH, where we have participated in related interop events. It's a great space with sharp engineers and an army of bright interns and grad students.
Please allow Atomic Rules to at least participate as an observer in the DPDK Lab project as we impedance-match to see if we can actually engage and contribute our software and hardware into this much-needed process.