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From: "Venkatesan, Venky" <venky.venkatesan@intel.com>
To: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>,
	Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
Cc: "dev@dpdk.org" <dev@dpdk.org>
Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] Poor device abstraction's
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 17:57:41 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1FD9B82B8BF2CF418D9A1000154491D97406521E@ORSMSX102.amr.corp.intel.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20140411174727.GF911@hmsreliant.think-freely.org>

Agree that the patch sets are a step towards fixing that, but there is a lot more to be done on this. Could we start discussion on what the "ideal" abstraction should be? I'd like to pool those into a formal proposal that we can discuss and drive through a series of patches to make that happen. Even semi-freezing anything prior to that would be premature. 

-Venky

-----Original Message-----
From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces@dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Neil Horman
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2014 10:47 AM
To: Stephen Hemminger
Cc: dev@dpdk.org
Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] Poor device abstraction's

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 10:33:31AM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> One of my pet peeve's is that the device driver config does not 
> abstract the properties of the Ethernet device. The existing 
> parameters match those of Intel's Ethernet hardware but not much else. 
> It also makes it hard to write generic applications.  If the 
> application has to query the device driver name string and insert 
> different parameters for igb, igbvf, ixgbe and vmxnet3 then the API was designed wrong.
> 
I agree.  I think the patches that recently got integrated from Olivier are a step toward fixing that, but theres some more work to be done.

Neil

> Specific examples:
>   * the "descriptors" argument to rx/tx is interpreted as a hardware resource
>     not the number of packets. An application really wants to say "you may buffer
>     up to 100us of packets" not have to guess what the underlying driver does.
> 
>   * the rthresh/wthresh/pthresh are PCI device artifacts and correct value is
>     different for each HW device shouldn't be exposed to application. The API
>     should be something like "device may burst up to N packets and/or T latency".
> 
> These seems like issues of a transition from a cool toy to talk to 
> Intel hardware to a useful application infrastructure.
> 
> That is why I would hate to see the existing Intel device centric API frozen.
> 

  reply	other threads:[~2014-04-11 17:56 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2014-04-09 18:39 [dpdk-dev] DPDK API/ABI Stability Neil Horman
2014-04-09 21:08 ` Stephen Hemminger
2014-04-10 10:54   ` Neil Horman
2014-04-11 17:33 ` [dpdk-dev] Poor device abstraction's Stephen Hemminger
2014-04-11 17:47   ` Neil Horman
2014-04-11 17:57     ` Venkatesan, Venky [this message]
2014-04-11 17:59       ` Neil Horman

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