Re: [dpdk-dev] Kernel Module dependency in DPDK 18.05-rc5 and earlier DPDK releases

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

On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 04:20:42PM +0300, Kevin Wilson wrote:
> Thanks, Thomas.
> 
> Actually there is an EAL rte_eal_check_module() method which does this exactly:
> http://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk/tree/lib/librte_eal/linuxapp/eal/eal.c#n1089
> It is declared in eal_private.h.
> 
> Is it reasonable to send a patch which moves the decalartion to eal.h
> instead so PMDs can use it in their probe() method ?
> 
> Apart from it -  So is there any practical effect for using the
> RTE_PMD_REGISTER_KMOD_DEP() ? or is it only a sort of declarative
> macro, saying that the PMD is dependent on the specified kernel
> modules ? In the past - did it really ever check for dependency and
> shouted back
> when the required modules specified in the RTE_PMD_REGISTER_KMOD_DEP()
> macro were not found ?
> 
AFAIK this information is only used for reporting out when running pmdinfo
on a driver or statically linked binary. It was never enforced at runtime,
simply because the lack of particular ports was never an error. If a module
was not loaded, and NICs not bound to that module, it was always assumed
that the ports were never meant to be used by DPDK anyway.

/Bruce