ENIC PMD is the DPDK poll-mode driver for the Cisco System Inc. VIC Ethernet NICs. These adapters are also referred to as vNICs below. If you are running or would like to run DPDK software applications on Cisco UCS servers using Cisco VIC adapters the following documentation is relevant.
The version of the ENIC PMD driver is 1.0.0.6 and will be printed by ENIC PMD during the initialization.
ENIC PMD support is integrated into the DPDK suite. dpdk-<version>.tar.gz should be downloaded from http://dpdk.org
DPDK Configuration Parameters
The following configuration options are available for the ENIC PMD:
vNIC Configuration Parameters
Number of Queues
The maximum number of receive and transmit queues are configurable on a per vNIC basis through the Cisco UCS Manager (CIMC or UCSM). These values should be configured to be greater than or equal to the nb_rx_q and nb_tx_q parameters expected to used in the call to the rte_eth_dev_configure() function.
Size of Queues
Likewise, the number of receive and transmit descriptors are configurable on a per vNIC bases via the UCS Manager and should be greater than or equal to the nb_rx_desc and nb_tx_desc parameters expected to be used in the calls to rte_eth_rx_queue_setup() and rte_eth_tx_queue_setup() respectively.
Interrupts
Only one interrupt per vNIC interface should be configured in the UCS manager regardless of the number receive/transmit queues. The ENIC PMD uses this interrupt to get information about errors in the fast path.
VLAN 0 Priority Tagging
If a vNIC is configured in TRUNK mode by the UCS manager, the adapter will priority tag egress packets according to 802.1Q if they were not already VLAN tagged by software. If the adapter is connected to a properly configured switch, there will be no unexpected behavior.
In test setups where an Ethernet port of a Cisco adapter in TRUNK mode is connected point-to-point to another adapter port or connected though a router instead of a switch, all ingress packets will be VLAN tagged. Programs such as l3fwd which do not account for VLAN tags in packets will misbehave. The solution is to enable VLAN stripping on ingress. The follow code fragment is example of how to accomplish this:
vlan_offload = rte_eth_dev_get_vlan_offload(port);
vlan_offload |= ETH_VLAN_STRIP_OFFLOAD;
rte_eth_dev_set_vlan_offload(port, vlan_offload);
The build instructions for the DPDK suite should be followed. By default the ENIC PMD library will be built into the DPDK library.
For configuring and using UIO and VFIO frameworks, please refer the documentation that comes with DPDK suite.
ENIC PMD supports all recent generations of Cisco VIC adapters including:
VIC 1280
VIC 1240
VIC 1225
VIC 1285
VIC 1225T
VIC 1227
VIC 1227T
VIC 1380
VIC 1340
VIC 1385
VIC 1387
(M81KR and P81E)
Any Linux distribution fulfilling the conditions described in Dependencies section of DPDK documentation.
At this point the system should be ready to run DPDK applications. Once the application runs to completion, the vNIC can be detached from vfio-pci or igb_uio if necessary.
Root privilege is required to bind and unbind vNICs to/from VFIO/UIO. VFIO framework helps an unprivileged user to run the applications. For an unprivileged user to run the applications on DPDK and ENIC PMD, it may be necessary to increase the maximum locked memory of the user. The following command could be used to do this.
sudo sh -c "ulimit -l <value in Kilo Bytes>"
The value depends on the memory configuration of the application, DPDK and PMD. Typically, the limit has to be raised to higher than 2GB. e.g., 2621440
The compilation of any unused drivers can be disabled using the configuration file in config/ directory (e.g., config/common_linuxapp). This would help in bringing down the time taken for building the libraries and the initialization time of the application.
Any questions or bugs should be reported to DPDK community and to the ENIC PMD maintainers: