Process for adding a new driver?

["Morten Brørup" <mb@smartsharesystems.com>]

Dear DPDK tech board,

The process for adding a new library to DPDK is well documented [1].

What is the process for adding a new (NIC) driver?

It seems like the task of reviewing NIC PMDs from vendors other than Broadcom/Intel/Marvell/NVIDIA falls entirely on the next-net tree maintainers, Ferruh and Andrew, which doesn't seem like a reasonable burden.

The Napatech driver is too large for Ferruh to review, which in my opinion [2] is an unreasonable argument for not accepting it.

And the 3SNIC driver got no attention by any reviewers [3]. (Although Stephen did provide some basic feedback after they polled for review.)

Overall, I think we should put much more trust in hardware vendors to provide high quality drivers for their hardware. We want vendors to upstream their drivers, with all the benefits of having the code public. If we make it too difficult, they will simply keep their drivers private instead.

@Maxime: I propose to put this on the agenda for the coming techboard meeting.


[1]: https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/contributing/new_library.html
[2]: http://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/98CBD80474FA8B44BF855DF32C47DC35D87BAF@smartserver.smartshare.dk/
[3]: http://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/6df9c00f-23a0-423f-840b-4ecf20ff82fc@3snic.com/


Med venlig hilsen / Kind regards,
-Morten Brørup