DPDK support in libpcap

DPDK support in libpcap

[Denis Ovsienko]

Hello all.

libpcap has been implementing DPDK packet capture support for some
time, in that a contributor added this support using DPDK 18.11.  This
code stopped working with later versions of DPDK and still remains
broken.

Would anybody be interested to upgrade pcap-dpdk.c in libpcap to the
latest stable release of DPDK, to confirm whether it works as intended
and maybe even to keep this module better maintained in future?

-- 
    Denis Ovsienko

Re: DPDK support in libpcap

[Stephen Hemminger]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 851 bytes --]

Last time I looked at that code it was really ugly, and messy. But more of
importantly it was the wrong use case. Very few users will want to have a
NIC dedicated to capture only.

The whole thing should be rewritten so that tcpdump/ Wireshark can run as
secondary process using existing pdump API.

On Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 15:20 Denis Ovsienko <denis@ovsienko.info> wrote:

> Hello all.
>
> libpcap has been implementing DPDK packet capture support for some
> time, in that a contributor added this support using DPDK 18.11.  This
> code stopped working with later versions of DPDK and still remains
> broken.
>
> Would anybody be interested to upgrade pcap-dpdk.c in libpcap to the
> latest stable release of DPDK, to confirm whether it works as intended
> and maybe even to keep this module better maintained in future?
>
> --
>     Denis Ovsienko
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1245 bytes --]

Re: DPDK support in libpcap

[Denis Ovsienko]

On Sat, 1 Mar 2025 10:28:21 +0100
Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org> wrote:

> Last time I looked at that code it was really ugly, and messy. But
> more of importantly it was the wrong use case. Very few users will
> want to have a NIC dedicated to capture only.
> 
> The whole thing should be rewritten so that tcpdump/ Wireshark can
> run as secondary process using existing pdump API.

Thank you for looking Stephen.

In case there is a volunteer to fix this at some time, this could be a
useful starting point for them.  You are welcome to update the bug
report [1] if you think this would help.

1: https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/libpcap/issues/1159

-- 
    Denis Ovsienko