On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 11:54:12AM +0200, Thomas Monjalon wrote: > 2016-04-20 18:43, Zhihong Wang: > > This RFC patch proposes a general purpose forwarding engine in testpmd > > namely "portfwd", to enable performance analysis and tuning for poll mode > > drivers in vSwitching scenarios. > > > > > > Problem statement > > ----------------- > > > > vSwitching is more I/O bound in a lot of cases since there are a lot of > > LLC/cross-core memory accesses. > > > > In order to reveal memory/cache behavior in real usage scenarios and enable > > efficient performance analysis and tuning for vSwitching, DPDK needs a > > sample application that supports traffic flow close to real deployment, > > e.g. multi-tenancy, service chaining. > > > > There is a vhost sample application currently to enable simple vSwitching > > scenarios, it comes with several limitations: > > > > 1) Traffic flow is too simple and not flexible > > > > 2) Switching based on MAC/VLAN only > > > > 3) Not enough performance metrics > > > > > > Proposed solution > > ----------------- > > > > The testpmd sample application is a good choice, it's a powerful poll mode > > driver management framework hosts various forwarding engine. > > Not sure it is a good choice. > The goal of testpmd is to test every PMD features. > How far can we go in adding some stack processing while keeping it > easily maintainable?
I was thinking the exact same thing. Would it not be better to enhance the existing vhost example application to remove the limitations you call out above? I don't particularly like the idea of introducing protocol awareness into testpmd for IP forwarding, for instance. Regards, /Bruce