2016-08-29 06:22, Finn Christensen: > From: Stephen Hemminger [mailto:stephen at networkplumber.org] > > What is the license of this driver suite? > > The driver suite is a closed-source driver, which is not free downloadable. > > > IMHO the upstream DPDK shouldn't be a platform for non-free driver suites. > > This is our first steps towards opensource, and our upcoming NIC is > partly build on HW and SW from our Accelerator products. > And since we already bypasses the kernel effectively in our driver, > this first solution for a DPDK PMD driver, has been built on top of > that software suite. > We like the idea of opensource, but we will need to do the transition > stepwise, considering our NIC product.
I think the first step should be to free the lowest level, here the code you build your drivers on. > We have seen large performance improvements (x4-x7 times with 64 byte > packets compared to a std NIC in a phy-ovs-vm-ovs-phy setup utilizing > a modified DPDK), and this is the main motivation to go forward and > try to push our contribution to DPDK upstream. > This is the first step of contributions that we want to make. > This DPDK PMD solution is not compileable unless you have our driver. Not being able to compile the PMD is a real problem for maintenance. The PMD would be considered as dead code, so is forbidden. > We may need to make that possible, so that a free downloadable driver > can be retrieved. > > Once this is said, we thought that the DPDK was BSD licensed and I must > admit that we have failed to see this limitation that you are mentioning. > Is there another license or agreement text that we need to read? Maybe you'll find some interesting parts in the contributing guide. But honestly, I think you have already done the right thing in your case: you sent some code and open the discussion :) Now you just need to enable a free compilation environment for your patch. Thanks