About VF support on 40G Intel NIC and Mellanox 100G NIC.

[royceniu]

Dear authors,

We are aiming at running mTCP on KVM Virtual Machine via SR-IOV VF of Intel 40G NIC (i40evf) and Mellanox 100G NIC (mlx5). Do you think that is feasible?

We have tested i40evf and failed. We think we may need to modify mTCP / DPDK. Could you provide some suggestions? I.e. Which parts should be modified?

[ajamshed]

@royceniu,

mTCP stack has not been ported to run for virtualized environments yet. But we are looking for volunteers who can help us enable VF support. In order to enable VF support, you need to do the following:

• Revamp igb_uio.ko kernel driver: We have been modifying igb_uio.c file to export net_device entry that represents each dpdk-enabled Ethernet port. The patched igb_uio.c file is the main reason why VFIO support is currently not possible. We need to switch back to the original version of igb_uio.c file and may be create a new kernel module that creates net_device entries for each dpdk registered Ethernet interface.
• Each VF-enabled interface should then rely on the new kernel module to create a net_device struct entry which the mTCP stack can then use for Ethernet RX/TX operations.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

[royceniu]

@ajamshed

Sure, we would like to do this task. Thanks.

However, we are not experts. We will try our best to do this and maybe ask you some questions on this later.

[ajamshed]

@royceniu,

Just FYI, we have updated the dpdk driver so that it can work with VFs as well.