Thanks everybody, It sounds as though what I'm looking for may be possible, especially with 1.7, but will require some tweaking and there will most definitely be a performance hit. That's great information. This is still just an experiment for us, and it's not at all guaranteed that I'm going to move towards smaller pages, but I very much appreciate the insights.
-- Matt Laswell On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 6:51 AM, Burakov, Anatoly <anatoly.burakov at intel.com> wrote: > Hi Matt, > > > I'm curious - is it possible in practical terms to run DPDK without > hugepages? > > Starting with release 1.7.0, support for VFIO was added, which allows > using DPDK without hugepages at al (including RX/TX rings) via the > --no-huge command-line parameter. Bear in mind though that you'll have to > have IOMMU/VT-d enabled (i.e. no VM support, only host-based) and also have > supported kernel version (3.6+) as well to use VFIO, the memory size will > be limited to 1G, and it won't work with multiprocess. I don't have any > performance figures on that unfortunately. > > Best regards, > Anatoly Burakov > DPDK SW Engineer >