Comment 6 for bug 1559408

Hi Thiago,
you were busy weren't you :-)

Thanks your further experiments and reports - I'll try to refer all the open points.
Trying to summarize:

1. The vfio grouping issue is not a bug, just the vfio setup being more complex in general. But you already handled that for your setup - great.
But as you found - eventually a working vfio and a uio_pci_generic gets you to the same - the PMD driver (trying to) work on the card.

2. Firmware issue - that is very specific to the BNX2X_PMD PMD and Cards you use.
I'd consider adding something to the Readme if we end up enabling that driver, but not really considering pushing oco FW packages with dpdk. Yet that should help the next getting to it.

3. Enabling this or other PMDs.
You already did for for your experiments which is great, but so far we only enabled those that were enabled by default and only a few that different parties have asked for. There are some reasons not "just" to enable all others.
- One is testability - I don't have all the HW and also time is short while still more issue being open against dpdk.
- the other one is that a lessons learned is that everything that is not actively used/tested is broken or at least can not be considered very stable.
As dpdk by history came from a "build the solution with the dpdk source" approach where he specific solution setup can apply a multitude of tweaks/fixes without caring about "others" too much that is not a good option for a generically provided package.
On the good side though, until the specific cards PMD driver is used the code is not really active.
Unfortunately I don't see a good option of saying something like "and these 5 more PMD are experimental" - I need to discuss that with more experienced packagers.
Maybe an extra package that brings "more" pmd drivers named dpdk-experimental, but that would due to its dependencies still have to be in main which I don't like. Also this is not working well with the combined library approach being used and linker script based solution is post dpdk 2.2

4. segfault/mem alloc issue
That is an interesting one which I was working on last week as well.
In fact this is not specific to your PMD driver - I was hitting that with virtio-pci based setup which should be "more" supported (default enabled by upstream dpdk). It is an issue that as far as I can tell only occurs in combination with OVS-DPDK (testpmd and such are running fine).
I was just about filing a bug to track that effort - please see 1559912

Final summary:
- I'll discuss if it is doable/reasonable to enable so more low-tested extra drivers with some co-devs here for this bug.
- We will track the issues regarding ovs-dpdk+dpdk+some-PMDs in bug 1559912