xref: /dpdk/doc/guides/compressdevs/isal.rst (revision 8809f78c7dd9f33a44a4f89c58fc91ded34296ed)
1..  SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
2    Copyright(c) 2018 Intel Corporation.
3
4ISA-L Compression Poll Mode Driver
5==================================
6
7The ISA-L PMD (**librte_compress_isal**) provides poll mode compression &
8decompression driver support for utilizing Intel ISA-L library,
9which implements the deflate algorithm for both Deflate(compression) and Inflate(decompression).
10
11
12Features
13--------
14
15ISA-L PMD has support for:
16
17Compression/Decompression algorithm:
18
19    * DEFLATE
20
21Huffman code type:
22
23    * FIXED
24    * DYNAMIC
25
26Window size support:
27
28    * 32K
29
30Checksum:
31
32    * CRC32
33    * ADLER32
34
35To enable a checksum in the driver, the compression and/or decompression xform
36structure, rte_comp_xform, must be filled with either of the CompressDev
37checksum flags supported. ::
38
39 compress_xform->compress.chksum = RTE_COMP_CHECKSUM_CRC32
40
41 decompress_xform->decompress.chksum = RTE_COMP_CHECKSUM_CRC32
42
43::
44
45 compress_xform->compress.chksum = RTE_COMP_CHECKSUM_ADLER32
46
47 decompress_xform->decompress.chksum = RTE_COMP_CHECKSUM_ADLER32
48
49If you request a checksum for compression or decompression,
50the checksum field in the operation structure,  ``op->output_chksum``,
51will be filled with the checksum.
52
53.. Note::
54
55 For the compression case above, your output buffer will need to be large enough to hold the compressed data plus a scratchpad for the checksum at the end, the scratchpad is 8 bytes for CRC32 and 4 bytes for Adler32.
56
57Level guide:
58
59The ISA-L levels have been mapped to somewhat correspond to the same ZLIB level,
60i.e. ZLIB L1 gives a compression ratio similar to ISA-L L1.
61Compressdev level 0 enables "No Compression", which passes the uncompressed
62data to the output buffer, plus deflate headers.
63The ISA-L library does not support this, therefore compressdev level 0 is not supported.
64
65The compressdev API has 10 levels, 0-9. ISA-L has 4 levels of compression, 0-3.
66As a result the level mappings from the API to the PMD are shown below.
67
68.. _table_ISA-L_compression_levels:
69
70.. table:: Level mapping from Compressdev to ISA-L PMD.
71
72   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
73   | Compressdev | PMD Functionality                            | Internal ISA-L                                |
74   | API Level   |                                              | Level                                         |
75   +=============+==============================================+===============================================+
76   | 0           | No compression, Not Supported                | ---                                           |
77   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
78   | 1           | Dynamic (Fast compression)                   | 1                                             |
79   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
80   | 2           | Dynamic                                      | 2                                             |
81   |             | (Higher compression ratio)                   |                                               |
82   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
83   | 3           | Dynamic                                      | 3                                             |
84   |             | (Best compression ratio)                     | (Level 2 if                                   |
85   |             |                                              | no AVX512/AVX2)                               |
86   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
87   | 4           | Dynamic (Best compression ratio)             | Same as above                                 |
88   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
89   | 5           | Dynamic (Best compression ratio)             | Same as above                                 |
90   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
91   | 6           | Dynamic (Best compression ratio)             | Same as above                                 |
92   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
93   | 7           | Dynamic (Best compression ratio)             | Same as above                                 |
94   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
95   | 8           | Dynamic (Best compression ratio)             | Same as above                                 |
96   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
97   | 9           | Dynamic (Best compression ratio)             | Same as above                                 |
98   +-------------+----------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
99
100.. Note::
101
102 The above table only shows mapping when API calls for dynamic compression.
103 For fixed compression, regardless of API level, internally ISA-L level 0 is always used.
104
105
106Limitations
107-----------
108
109* Compressdev level 0, no compression, is not supported.
110
111Installation
112------------
113
114* To build DPDK with Intel's ISA-L library, the user is required to download the library from `<https://github.com/01org/isa-l>`_.
115
116* Once downloaded, the user needs to build the library, the ISA-L autotools are usually sufficient::
117
118    ./autogen.sh
119    ./configure
120
121* make can  be used to install the library on their system, before building DPDK::
122
123    make
124    sudo make install
125
126* To build with meson, the **libisal.pc** file, must be copied into "pkgconfig",
127  e.g. /usr/lib/pkgconfig or /usr/lib64/pkgconfig depending on your system,
128  for meson to find the ISA-L library. The **libisal.pc** is located in library sources::
129
130    cp isal/libisal.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/
131
132
133Initialization
134--------------
135
136To use the PMD in an application, user must:
137
138* Call ``rte_vdev_init("compress_isal")`` within the application.
139
140* Use ``--vdev="compress_isal"`` in the EAL options, which will call ``rte_vdev_init()`` internally.
141
142The following parameter (optional) can be provided in the previous two calls:
143
144* ``socket_id:`` Specify the socket where the memory for the device is going to be allocated
145  (by default, socket_id will be the socket where the core that is creating the PMD is running on).
146