Re: [dpdk-dev] VMware Fusion + DPDK and KNI

[Alex Markuze <alex@weka.io>]

I'm pretty sure I will stumble on this issue in the near feature.
Thanks for the heads up.

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 9:16 PM, Jay Rolette <rolette@infiniteio.com> wrote:
> Thought I'd put this out there in case anyone else runs into it.
>
> Using DPDK 1.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in a hardware appliance. Also using KNI
> to share the data ports with an app that needs a normal TCP/IP stack
> interface.
>
> We had everything working reasonably well on the hardware, but most of our
> developers run their code in a VM on their laptops: OS X (Mavericks) +
> VMware Fusion 6 Pro.
>
> On some VMs, we were getting errors trying to configure KNI ports:
>
> $ sudo ifconfig ffEth0 10.111.2.100 netmask 255.255.0.0 up
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Timer expired
> SIOCSIFFLAGS: Timer expired
>
> Skipping the "fun" involved with trying to track down the problem, here's
> what ended up fixing it.
>
> We had 4 network ports on the VM:
>
>    - eth0 - Management port
>    - eth1 - "other" function not related to the problem
>    - eth2 & eth3 - inline datapath (bump-in-the-wire), but also KNI mapped
>    to ffEth0 & ffEth1 by our DPDK app
>
> If eth2 and eth3 are on the same vmnet, you'll get the "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Timer
> expired" errors. Depending on what parameters you try to set, ifconfig may
> think some of them have taken effect (they haven't) or it won't (setting
> the MTU, etc.).
>
> If you put eth2 and eth3 on separate vmnets, then no issues and you can
> configure the KNI ports via ifconfig as expected.
>
> No idea why having the ports on the same vmnet matters, since our app
> doesn't care, but I haven't gone spelunking through the KNI source to find
> the root cause.
>
> Doubtful this will matter to many (any?), but maybe it'll save someone some
> time.
>
> Jay Rolette
> *infinite io*