1. NXP DPAA Eventdev Driver

The dpaa eventdev is an implementation of the eventdev API, that provides a wide range of the eventdev features. The eventdev relies on a dpaa based platform to perform event scheduling.

More information can be found at NXP Official Website.

1.1. Features

The DPAA EVENTDEV implements many features in the eventdev API;

  • Hardware based event scheduler
  • 4 event ports
  • 4 event queues
  • Parallel flows
  • Atomic flows

1.2. Supported DPAA SoCs

  • LS1046A
  • LS1043A

1.3. Prerequisites

There are following pre-requisites for executing EVENTDEV on a DPAA compatible platform:

  1. ARM 64 Tool Chain
For example, the *aarch64* Linaro Toolchain.

  1. Linux Kernel

    It can be obtained from NXP’s Github hosting.

  2. Rootfile System

    Any aarch64 supporting filesystem can be used. For example, Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily) or 16.04 LTS (Xenial) userland which can be obtained from here.

As an alternative method, DPAA EVENTDEV can also be executed using images provided as part of SDK from NXP. The SDK includes all the above prerequisites necessary to bring up a DPAA board.

The following dependencies are not part of DPDK and must be installed separately:

  • NXP Linux SDK

    NXP Linux software development kit (SDK) includes support for family of QorIQ® ARM-Architecture-based system on chip (SoC) processors and corresponding boards.

    It includes the Linux board support packages (BSPs) for NXP SoCs, a fully operational tool chain, kernel and board specific modules.

    SDK and related information can be obtained from: NXP QorIQ SDK.

  • DPDK Extra Scripts

    DPAA based resources can be configured easily with the help of ready to use xml files as provided in the DPDK Extra repository.

    DPDK Extras Scripts.

Currently supported by DPDK:

1.4. Pre-Installation Configuration

1.4.1. Config File Options

The following options can be modified in the config file. Please note that enabling debugging options may affect system performance.

  • CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_PMD_DPAA_EVENTDEV (default y)

    Toggle compilation of the librte_pmd_dpaa_event driver.

1.4.2. Driver Compilation

To compile the DPAA EVENTDEV PMD for Linux arm64 gcc target, run the following make command:

cd <DPDK-source-directory>
make config T=arm64-dpaa-linuxapp-gcc install

1.5. Initialization

The dpaa eventdev is exposed as a vdev device which consists of a set of channels and queues. On EAL initialization, dpaa components will be probed and then vdev device can be created from the application code by

  • Invoking rte_vdev_init("event_dpaa1") from the application
  • Using --vdev="event_dpaa1" in the EAL options, which will call rte_vdev_init() internally

Example:

./your_eventdev_application --vdev="event_dpaa1"

1.6. Limitations

  1. DPAA eventdev can not work with DPAA PUSH mode queues configured for ethdev. Please configure export DPAA_NUM_PUSH_QUEUES=0

1.6.1. Platform Requirement

DPAA drivers for DPDK can only work on NXP SoCs as listed in the Supported DPAA SoCs.

1.6.2. Port-core Binding

DPAA EVENTDEV driver requires event port ‘x’ to be used on core ‘x’.