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Hi Experts,

Background:

We are using DPDK to develop a LoadBalancer following below logic: When a new 
packet is received:
 1. if the dst_addr is management IP, forward to KNI. 2. if the dst_addr is in 
VIP list, select backend and forward(modify dst mac address). 3. otherwise drop 
the packet. 

At this stage, we use one single thread for KNI forwarding and another for VIP 
forwarding(forward to eth).

DPDK version: 16.07
 NIC: 82599ES 10-Gigabit SFI/SFP+ Network Connection
 Linux: 14.04.1-Ubuntu x64  

Promblem description:

The program runs correctly for sometime(around 2 hours for 400Mb traffic). But 
it it will hang. When problem happens, rte_eth_tx_burst() will not able to send 
out any packets(always returns 0). We tracked into that function and noticed it 
is actually calling ixgbe driver's ixgbe_xmit_pkts_vec() function in our 
environment, because we use default tx queue configuration, after printing some 
info, we found if the free function works fine:
 tx_rs_thresh: 32, tx_free_thresh: 32, nb_tx_free: 31 

it will trigger free and make 32 more free descriptors:
 tx_rs_thresh: 32, tx_free_thresh: 32, nb_tx_free: 62 

but when something going wrong, it will no longer free anything:
 tx_rs_thresh: 32, tx_free_thresh: 32, nb_tx_free: 0 tx_rs_thresh: 32, 
tx_free_thresh: 32, nb_tx_free: 0 

It may related with the DD flag of the descriptor but we are not quite sure.

Our program logic:

create two mbuf pools on socket 0, one for rx_queue and one for kni. (all lcore 
threads runs on socket0)

init kni interface with rte_kni_alloc()


init one NIC interface with
 rte_eth_dev_configure(); rte_eth_rx_queue_setup(); rte_eth_tx_queue_setup(); 
rte_eth_dev_start(); 



in the eth main loop: (code is simplified)
 while(1) {     n = rte_eth_rx_burst(packets);     for (i = 0; i < n; ++i)      
{         if (SEND_TO_KNI) {             m = rte_kni_tx_burst(packets[i]);      
       if (m != 1)) {                 rte_pktmbuf_free(packets[i]);             
}         }         if (SEND_TO_ETH) {             // after modify the packet   
          m = rte_eth_tx_burst(packets[i]);             if (m != 1)) {          
       rte_pktmbuf_free(packets[i]);             }         }         // 
otherwise drop the packet         rte_pktmbuf_free(packets[i]);     } } 


Please advise if I'm using DPDK in a wrong way. Sorry if I missed something 
basic, I'm new to DPDK.

Thanks in advance
 Best regards

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