xref: /dpdk/doc/guides/compressdevs/isal.rst (revision e977e4199a8d6bab72cf94e154adcad1fb964e5e)
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_pmd_isal_comp**) provides poll mode compression &
8decompression driver support for utilizing Intel ISA-L library,
9which implements the deflate algorithm for both compression and decompression
10
11Features
12--------
13
14ISA-L PMD has support for:
15
16Compression/Decompression algorithm:
17
18* DEFLATE
19
20Huffman code type:
21
22* FIXED
23* DYNAMIC
24
25Window size support:
26
27* 32K
28
29Limitations
30-----------
31
32* Chained mbufs are not supported, for future release.
33
34* Compressdev level 0, no compression, is not supported. ISA-L level 0 used for fixed huffman codes.
35
36* Checksums are not supported, for future release.
37
38Installation
39------------
40
41* To build DPDK with Intel's ISA-L library, the user is required to download the library from `<https://github.com/01org/isa-l>`_.
42
43* Once downloaded, the user needs to build the library, the ISA-L autotools are usually sufficient::
44
45    ./autogen.sh
46    ./configure
47
48* make can  be used to install the library on their system, before building DPDK::
49
50    make
51    sudo make install
52
53* To build with meson, the **libisal.pc** file, must be copied into "pkgconfig",
54  e.g. /usr/lib/pkgconfig or /usr/lib64/pkgconfig depending on your system,
55  for meson to find the ISA-L library. The **libisal.pc** is located in library sources::
56
57    cp isal/libisal.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/
58
59
60Initialization
61--------------
62
63In order to enable this virtual compression PMD, user must:
64
65* Set ``CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_PMD_ISAL=y`` in config/common_base.
66
67To use the PMD in an application, user must:
68
69* Call ``rte_vdev_init("compress_isal")`` within the application.
70
71* Use ``--vdev="compress_isal"`` in the EAL options, which will call ``rte_vdev_init()`` internally.
72
73The following parameter (optional) can be provided in the previous two calls:
74
75* ``socket_id:`` Specify the socket where the memory for the device is going to be allocated
76  (by default, socket_id will be the socket where the core that is creating the PMD is running on).
77