Re: PMD for non PCI device

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2024 at 07:36:16PM +0530, Prashant Upadhyaya wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a usecase where I have to evaluate writing a DPDK PMD for a non
> PCI/e device doing the ethernet packet i/o.
> 
> Wanted to know if the above usecase is supported by DPDK infra and any
> pointers on how one should go about writing a PMD for such a usecase
> if supported. Would appreciate any inputs.
> 
Hi,

yes, such a usecase is supported, but the specifics of how to go about it
will vary depending on the type of PMD it is. DPDK already supports a range
of other types of PMD, for emulated, or SW backed PMDs, e.g. net/pcap
driver, and drivers for various SoCs which don't use PCI. For the case
where the PMD is backed by real hardware (or an emulated device that
appears to a VM as a piece of hardware), you may want to consider writing a
"bus" driver for DPDK to support probing of the device. For non-HW
devices, the "vdev" bus may be what you want to use, where probing is not
done and devices are created in response to cmdline arguments on init, or
via C APIs later in the app.

Regards,
/Bruce