xref: /dpdk/doc/guides/nics/fm10k.rst (revision 8d54b1ec4a8be40975ae6978535bcc1431caad02)
1..  SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
2    Copyright(c) 2015-2016 Intel Corporation.
3
4FM10K Poll Mode Driver
5======================
6
7The FM10K poll mode driver library provides support for the Intel FM10000
8(FM10K) family of 40GbE/100GbE adapters.
9
10FTAG Based Forwarding of FM10K
11------------------------------
12
13FTAG Based Forwarding is a unique feature of FM10K. The FM10K family of NICs
14support the addition of a Fabric Tag (FTAG) to carry special information.
15The FTAG is placed at the beginning of the frame, it contains information
16such as where the packet comes from and goes, and the vlan tag. In FTAG based
17forwarding mode, the switch logic forwards packets according to glort (global
18resource tag) information, rather than the mac and vlan table. Currently this
19feature works only on PF.
20
21To enable this feature, the user should pass a devargs parameter to the eal
22like "-a 84:00.0,enable_ftag=1", and the application should make sure an
23appropriate FTAG is inserted for every frame on TX side.
24
25Vector PMD for FM10K
26--------------------
27
28Vector PMD (vPMD) uses Intel® SIMD instructions to optimize packet I/O.
29It improves load/store bandwidth efficiency of L1 data cache by using a wider
30SSE/AVX ''register (1)''.
31The wider register gives space to hold multiple packet buffers so as to save
32on the number of instructions when bulk processing packets.
33
34There is no change to the PMD API. The RX/TX handlers are the only two entries for
35vPMD packet I/O. They are transparently registered at runtime RX/TX execution
36if all required conditions are met.
37
38Some constraints apply as pre-conditions for specific optimizations on bulk
39packet transfers. The following sections explain RX and TX constraints in the
40vPMD.
41
42
43RX Constraints
44~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
45
46
47Prerequisites and Pre-conditions
48^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
49
50For Vector RX it is assumed that the number of descriptor rings will be a power
51of 2. With this pre-condition, the ring pointer can easily scroll back to the
52head after hitting the tail without a conditional check. In addition Vector RX
53can use this assumption to do a bit mask using ``ring_size - 1``.
54
55
56Features not Supported by Vector RX PMD
57^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
58
59Some features are not supported when trying to increase the throughput in
60vPMD. They are:
61
62*   IEEE1588
63
64*   Flow director
65
66*   RX checksum offload
67
68Other features are supported using optional MACRO configuration. They include:
69
70*   HW VLAN strip
71
72*   L3/L4 packet type
73
74To enable via ``RX_OLFLAGS`` use ``RTE_LIBRTE_FM10K_RX_OLFLAGS_ENABLE=y``.
75
76To guarantee the constraint, the following capabilities in ``dev_conf.rxmode.offloads``
77will be checked:
78
79*   ``RTE_ETH_RX_OFFLOAD_VLAN_EXTEND``
80
81*   ``RTE_ETH_RX_OFFLOAD_CHECKSUM``
82
83
84RX Burst Size
85^^^^^^^^^^^^^
86
87As vPMD is focused on high throughput, it processes 4 packets at a time. So it assumes
88that the RX burst should be greater than 4 packets per burst. It returns zero if using
89``nb_pkt`` < 4 in the receive handler. If ``nb_pkt`` is not a multiple of 4, a
90floor alignment will be applied.
91
92
93TX Constraint
94~~~~~~~~~~~~~
95
96Features not Supported by TX Vector PMD
97^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
98
99TX vPMD only works when offloads is set to 0
100
101This means that it does not support any TX offload.
102
103Limitations
104-----------
105
106
107Switch manager
108~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
109
110The Intel FM10000 family of NICs integrate a hardware switch and multiple host
111interfaces. The FM10000 PMD only manages host interfaces. For the
112switch component another switch driver has to be loaded prior to the
113FM10000 PMD. The switch driver can be acquired from Intel support.
114Only Testpoint is validated with DPDK, the latest version that has been
115validated with DPDK is 4.1.6.
116
117Support for Switch Restart
118~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
119
120For FM10000 multi host based design a DPDK app running in the VM or host needs
121to be aware of the switch's state since it may undergo a quit-restart. When
122the switch goes down the DPDK app will receive a LSC event indicating link
123status down, and the app should stop the worker threads that are polling on
124the Rx/Tx queues. When switch comes up, a LSC event indicating ``LINK_UP`` is
125sent to the app, which can then restart the FM10000 port to resume network
126processing.
127
128CRC stripping
129~~~~~~~~~~~~~
130
131The FM10000 family of NICs strip the CRC for every packets coming into the
132host interface. So, keeping CRC is not supported.
133
134Maximum packet length
135~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
136
137The FM10000 family of NICS support a maximum of a 15K jumbo frame. The value
138is fixed and cannot be changed. So, even when the ``rxmode.mtu``
139member of ``struct rte_eth_conf`` is set to a value lower than 15364, frames
140up to 15364 bytes can still reach the host interface.
141
142Statistic Polling Frequency
143~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
144
145The FM10000 NICs expose a set of statistics via the PCI BARs. These statistics
146are read from the hardware registers when ``rte_eth_stats_get()`` or
147``rte_eth_xstats_get()`` is called. The packet counting registers are 32 bits
148while the byte counting registers are 48 bits. As a result, the statistics must
149be polled regularly in order to ensure the consistency of the returned reads.
150
151Given the PCIe Gen3 x8, about 50Gbps of traffic can occur. With 64 byte packets
152this gives almost 100 million packets/second, causing 32 bit integer overflow
153after approx 40 seconds. To ensure these overflows are detected and accounted
154for in the statistics, it is necessary to read statistic regularly. It is
155suggested to read stats every 20 seconds, which will ensure the statistics
156are accurate.
157
158
159Interrupt mode
160~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
161
162The FM10000 family of NICS need one separate interrupt for mailbox. So only
163drivers which support multiple interrupt vectors e.g. vfio-pci can work
164for fm10k interrupt mode.
165