Initial Setup and best practices

[Simon Brown <lists@700c.org>]

Hello,

I'm new to DPDK and I'm trying to setup a simple project to count packets. I'm 
using MoonGen to generate the traffic on one machine and can receive the data 
using traditional sockets on another machine. So I know that part works.

I've built dpdk 21.11 and I've tried to modify the example rxtx callbacks 
application to count packets, but it doesn't see any traffic. So I presume 
there's something wrong with my environment.

Can you advise on how to verify that my environment is correct and what is the 
recommended setup for new projects? Should I be using the virtualisation 
interface vfio-pci or the other interfaces? I have mlx5, i40e and ice NICs 
available for test.

For mlx5 dpdk-devbind suggests that vfio-pci is compatible whereas mlx5_core 
is a kernel driver, but trying to run with vfio-pci leads to:

mlx5_common: No Verbs device matches PCI device 0000:01:00.0, are kernel 
drivers loaded?

mlx5 seems to work correctly with MoonGen.

Any help greatly appreciated,

Simon