1.. SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause 2 Copyright(c) 2010-2014 Intel Corporation. 3 4.. include:: <isonum.txt> 5 6System Requirements 7=================== 8 9This chapter describes the packages required to compile the DPDK. 10 11BIOS Setting Prerequisite on x86 12-------------------------------- 13 14For the majority of platforms, no special BIOS settings are needed to use basic DPDK functionality. 15However, for additional HPET timer and power management functionality, 16and high performance of small packets, BIOS setting changes may be needed. 17Consult the section on :ref:`Enabling Additional Functionality <Enabling_Additional_Functionality>` 18for more information on the required changes. 19 20Compilation of the DPDK 21----------------------- 22 23**Required Tools and Libraries:** 24 25.. note:: 26 27 The setup commands and installed packages needed on various systems may be different. 28 For details on Linux distributions and the versions tested, please consult the DPDK Release Notes. 29 30* General development tools including a supported C compiler such as gcc (version 4.9+) or clang (version 3.4+), 31 and ``pkg-config`` or ``pkgconf`` to be used when building end-user binaries against DPDK. 32 33 * For RHEL/Fedora systems these can be installed using ``dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"`` 34 * For Ubuntu/Debian systems these can be installed using ``apt install build-essential`` 35 * For Alpine Linux, ``apk add alpine-sdk bsd-compat-headers libexecinfo-dev`` 36 37.. note:: 38 39 pkg-config 0.27, supplied with RHEL-7, 40 does not process the Libs.private section correctly, 41 resulting in statically linked applications not being linked properly. 42 Use an updated version of ``pkg-config`` or ``pkgconf`` instead when building applications 43 44* Python 3.5 or later. 45 46* Meson (version 0.49.2+) and ninja 47 48 * ``meson`` & ``ninja-build`` packages in most Linux distributions 49 * If the packaged version is below the minimum version, the latest versions 50 can be installed from Python's "pip" repository: ``pip3 install meson ninja`` 51 52* ``pyelftools`` (version 0.22+) 53 54 * For Fedora systems it can be installed using ``dnf install python-pyelftools`` 55 * For RHEL/CentOS systems it can be installed using ``pip3 install pyelftools`` 56 * For Ubuntu/Debian it can be installed using ``apt install python3-pyelftools`` 57 * For Alpine Linux, ``apk add py3-elftools`` 58 59* Library for handling NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access). 60 61 * ``numactl-devel`` in RHEL/Fedora; 62 * ``libnuma-dev`` in Debian/Ubuntu; 63 * ``numactl-dev`` in Alpine Linux 64 65.. note:: 66 67 Please ensure that the latest patches are applied to third party libraries 68 and software to avoid any known vulnerabilities. 69 70 71**Optional Tools:** 72 73* Intel\ |reg| C++ Compiler (icc). For installation, additional libraries may be required. 74 See the icc Installation Guide found in the Documentation directory under the compiler installation. 75 76* IBM\ |reg| Advance ToolChain for Powerlinux. This is a set of open source development tools and runtime libraries 77 which allows users to take leading edge advantage of IBM's latest POWER hardware features on Linux. To install 78 it, see the IBM official installation document. 79 80**Additional Libraries** 81 82A number of DPDK components, such as libraries and poll-mode drivers (PMDs) have additional dependencies. 83For DPDK builds, the presence or absence of these dependencies will be automatically detected 84enabling or disabling the relevant components appropriately. 85 86In each case, the relevant library development package (``-devel`` or ``-dev``) is needed to build the DPDK components. 87 88For libraries the additional dependencies include: 89 90* libarchive: for some unit tests using tar to get their resources. 91 92* libelf: to compile and use the bpf library. 93 94For poll-mode drivers, the additional dependencies for each driver can be 95found in that driver's documentation in the relevant DPDK guide document, 96e.g. :doc:`../nics/index` 97 98Running DPDK Applications 99------------------------- 100 101To run a DPDK application, some customization may be required on the target machine. 102 103System Software 104~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 105 106**Required:** 107 108* Kernel version >= 4.4 109 110 The kernel version required is based on the oldest long term stable kernel available 111 at kernel.org when the DPDK version is in development. 112 Compatibility for recent distribution kernels will be kept, notably RHEL/CentOS 7. 113 114 The kernel version in use can be checked using the command:: 115 116 uname -r 117 118* glibc >= 2.7 (for features related to cpuset) 119 120 The version can be checked using the ``ldd --version`` command. 121 122* Kernel configuration 123 124 In the Fedora OS and other common distributions, such as Ubuntu, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, 125 the vendor supplied kernel configurations can be used to run most DPDK applications. 126 127 For other kernel builds, options which should be enabled for DPDK include: 128 129 * HUGETLBFS 130 131 * PROC_PAGE_MONITOR support 132 133 * HPET and HPET_MMAP configuration options should also be enabled if HPET support is required. 134 See the section on :ref:`High Precision Event Timer (HPET) Functionality <High_Precision_Event_Timer>` for more details. 135 136.. _linux_gsg_hugepages: 137 138Use of Hugepages in the Linux Environment 139~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 140 141Hugepage support is required for the large memory pool allocation used for packet buffers 142(the HUGETLBFS option must be enabled in the running kernel as indicated the previous section). 143By using hugepage allocations, performance is increased since fewer pages are needed, 144and therefore less Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs, high speed translation caches), 145which reduce the time it takes to translate a virtual page address to a physical page address. 146Without hugepages, high TLB miss rates would occur with the standard 4k page size, slowing performance. 147 148Reserving Hugepages for DPDK Use 149^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 150 151The reservation of hugepages can be performed at run time. 152This is done by echoing the number of hugepages required 153to a ``nr_hugepages`` file in the ``/sys/kernel/`` directory 154corresponding to a specific page size (in Kilobytes). 155For a single-node system, the command to use is as follows 156(assuming that 1024 of 2MB pages are required):: 157 158 echo 1024 > /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages 159 160On a NUMA machine, the above command will usually divide the number of hugepages 161equally across all NUMA nodes (assuming there is enough memory on all NUMA nodes). 162However, pages can also be reserved explicitly on individual NUMA nodes 163using a ``nr_hugepages`` file in the ``/sys/devices/`` directory:: 164 165 echo 1024 > /sys/devices/system/node/node0/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages 166 echo 1024 > /sys/devices/system/node/node1/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages 167 168The tool ``dpdk-hugepages.py`` can be used to manage hugepages. 169 170.. note:: 171 172 Some kernel versions may not allow reserving 1 GB hugepages at run time, 173 so reserving them at boot time may be the only option. 174 Please see below for instructions. 175 176**Alternative:** 177 178In the general case, reserving hugepages at run time is perfectly fine, 179but in use cases where having lots of physically contiguous memory is required, 180it is preferable to reserve hugepages at boot time, 181as that will help in preventing physical memory from becoming heavily fragmented. 182 183To reserve hugepages at boot time, a parameter is passed to the Linux kernel on the kernel command line. 184 185For 2 MB pages, just pass the hugepages option to the kernel. For example, to reserve 1024 pages of 2 MB, use:: 186 187 hugepages=1024 188 189For other hugepage sizes, for example 1G pages, the size must be specified explicitly and 190can also be optionally set as the default hugepage size for the system. 191For example, to reserve 4G of hugepage memory in the form of four 1G pages, the following options should be passed to the kernel:: 192 193 default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=4 194 195.. note:: 196 197 The hugepage sizes that a CPU supports can be determined from the CPU flags on Intel architecture. 198 If pse exists, 2M hugepages are supported; if pdpe1gb exists, 1G hugepages are supported. 199 On IBM Power architecture, the supported hugepage sizes are 16MB and 16GB. 200 201.. note:: 202 203 For 64-bit applications, it is recommended to use 1 GB hugepages if the platform supports them. 204 205In the case of a dual-socket NUMA system, 206the number of hugepages reserved at boot time is generally divided equally between the two sockets 207(on the assumption that sufficient memory is present on both sockets). 208 209See the Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt file in your Linux source tree for further details of these and other kernel options. 210 211Using Hugepages with the DPDK 212^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 213 214If secondary process support is not required, DPDK is able to use hugepages 215without any configuration by using "in-memory" mode. 216Please see :doc:`linux_eal_parameters` for more details. 217 218If secondary process support is required, 219mount points for hugepages need to be created. 220On modern Linux distributions, a default mount point for hugepages 221is provided by the system and is located at ``/dev/hugepages``. 222This mount point will use the default hugepage size 223set by the kernel parameters as described above. 224 225However, in order to use hugepage sizes other than the default, it is necessary 226to manually create mount points for those hugepage sizes (e.g. 1GB pages). 227 228To make the hugepages of size 1GB available for DPDK use, 229following steps must be performed:: 230 231 mkdir /mnt/huge 232 mount -t hugetlbfs pagesize=1GB /mnt/huge 233 234The mount point can be made permanent across reboots, by adding the following line to the ``/etc/fstab`` file:: 235 236 nodev /mnt/huge hugetlbfs pagesize=1GB 0 0 237