DPDK driver autoloading?
The current DPDK PCI code requires that all PMD shared libraries be loaded before probing. This a burden for applications that run on multiple platforms and a total mess for Linux distributions.
A better way would be to have the bus scanning code autoload drivers as needed. This would work like the Linux kernel module loading.
Could existing pmdinfogen mechanism be extended to to do this?
Quoted 9 lines · Stephen Hemminger
The current DPDK PCI code requires that all PMD shared libraries be loaded before probing. This a burden for applications that run on multiple platforms and a total mess for Linux distributions.
A better way would be to have the bus scanning code autoload drivers as needed. This would work like the Linux kernel module loading.
Could existing pmdinfogen mechanism be extended to to do this?
Can you clarify a bit more about what the problem is here? How does EAL loading the modules first make things a mess for distributions, compared to loading them on-demand? With both schemes you naturally need to ensure all needed drivers are present, and can remove any unneeded drivers. The only difference is that with our current scheme some unneeded drivers which are present will be loaded at runtime but idle/unused - hardly a massive impact, I would think. What am I missing here?
/Bruce