[dpdk-dev] Best Practices for PMD Verification before Upstream Requests

[Shepard Siegel <shepard.siegel@atomicrules.com>]

Hi,


Atomic Rules is new to the DPDK community. We attended the DPDK Summit last
week and received terrific advice and encouragement. We are developing a
DPDK PMD for our Arkville product which is a DPDK-aware data mover, capable
of marshaling packets between FPGA/ASIC gates with AXI interfaces on one
side, and the DPDK API/ABI on the other. Arkville plus a MAC looks like a
line-rate-agnostic bare-bones L2 NIC. We have testpmd and our first DPDK
applications running using our early-alpha Arkville PMD.


This post is to ask of the DPDK community what tests, regressions,
check-lists or similar verification assets we might work through before
starting the process to upstream our code? We know device-specific PMDs are
rather cloistered and unlikely to interfere; but still, others must have
managed to find a way to fail with even an L2 baseline NIC.  We don’t want
to needlessly repeat those mistakes. Any DPDK-specific collateral that we
can use to verify and validate our codes before attempting to upstream them
would be greatly appreciated. To the DPDK PMD developers, what can you
share so that we are more aligned with your regressions? To the DPDK
application developers, what’s your top gripe we might try to avoid in our
Arkville L2 baseline PMD?


Thanks in advance. We won’t have anyone at the Dublin DPDK Summit, but we
will be at FPL2016 in two weeks. Any constructive feedback is greatly
appreciated!


Shepard Siegel, CTO

atomicrules.com


<http://atomicrules.com>