Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 0/4] New library: rte_distributor

[Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>]

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:02:15AM +0000, Richardson, Bruce wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Neil Horman [mailto:nhorman@tuxdriver.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 11:39 AM
> > To: Richardson, Bruce
> > Cc: dev@dpdk.org
> > Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 0/4] New library: rte_distributor
> > 
> > >
> > This sounds an awful lot like the team and bonding drivers.  Why implement this
> > as a separate application accessible api, rather than a stacked PMD?  If you do
> > the latter then existing applications could concievably change their
> > configurations to use this technology and gain the benefit of load distribution
> > without having to alter the application to use a new api.
> > 
> 
> I'm not sure I see the similarity with the bonded driver, which merges multiple ports into a single logical port, i.e. you pull packets from a single source which is actually pull packets from possibly multiple sources behind the scenes, whereas this takes packets from an unknown source and distributes them among a set of workers a single packet at a time. (While handling single packets is slower than handling packet bursts, it is something that is sometimes needed to support existing code which may not be written to work with packet bursts.) 
> 
Ah, my bad, I was looking at the API as a way of multiplexing locally generated
data to multiple workers for transmission over multiple network interfaces, not
to demultiplex received data to multiple workers.  That makes more sense.  Sorry
for the noise.  I've got a few more comments inline with the rest of your
patches.
Neil