Re: [dpdk-dev] Userspace testing

[David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 4:35 PM Owen Hilyard <ohilyard@iol.unh.edu> wrote:
> I was wondering what everyone's thoughts on doing both userspace testing
> and unprivileged testing of dpdk applications is. DTS currently runs all
> commands on the tester and the dut as the root user. Please correct me if
> I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption that most applications written
> with dpdk would not run as root. This could present a problem since it is
> possible that permissions errors could arise and we wouldn't notice it due
> to the way we currently test. Given that, I was wondering what should and
> should not be possible as a normal (non-root) user, and what would be the
> best way to go about verifying this.

That is an interesting idea.

There are things that won't work unless you give proper permissions
(vfio, hugepages) or capabilities (like for bifurcated solutions: mlx
being the first example that comes to mind).
Additionally, some distributions apply further restrictions, like
SElinux in RHEL. But on this side, I don't think it makes sense, as
selinux rules are distrib specific.

-- 
David Marchand