2. System Requirements

This chapter describes the packages required to compile the DPDK.

Note

If the DPDK is being used on an Intel® Communications Chipset 89xx Series platform, please consult the Intel® Communications Chipset 89xx Series Software for Linux Getting Started Guide.

2.1. BIOS Setting Prerequisite on x86

For the majority of platforms, no special BIOS settings are needed to use basic DPDK functionality. However, for additional HPET timer and power management functionality, and high performance of small packets, BIOS setting changes may be needed. Consult the section on Enabling Additional Functionality for more information on the required changes.

Note

If UEFI secure boot is enabled, the Linux kernel may disallow the use of UIO on the system. Therefore, devices for use by DPDK should be bound to the vfio-pci kernel module rather than igb_uio or uio_pci_generic. For more details see Binding and Unbinding Network Ports to/from the Kernel Modules.

2.2. Compilation of the DPDK

Required Tools and Libraries:

Note

The setup commands and installed packages needed on various systems may be different. For details on Linux distributions and the versions tested, please consult the DPDK Release Notes.

  • GNU make.

  • coreutils: cmp, sed, grep, arch, etc.

  • gcc: versions 4.9 or later is recommended for all platforms. On some distributions, some specific compiler flags and linker flags are enabled by default and affect performance (-fstack-protector, for example). Please refer to the documentation of your distribution and to gcc -dumpspecs.

  • libc headers, often packaged as gcc-multilib (glibc-devel.i686 / libc6-dev-i386; glibc-devel.x86_64 / libc6-dev for 64-bit compilation on Intel architecture; glibc-devel.ppc64 for 64 bit IBM Power architecture;)

  • Linux kernel headers or sources required to build kernel modules. (kernel - devel.x86_64; kernel - devel.ppc64)

  • Additional packages required for 32-bit compilation on 64-bit systems are:

    • glibc.i686, libgcc.i686, libstdc++.i686 and glibc-devel.i686 for Intel i686/x86_64;
    • glibc.ppc64, libgcc.ppc64, libstdc++.ppc64 and glibc-devel.ppc64 for IBM ppc_64;

    Note

    x86_x32 ABI is currently supported with distribution packages only on Ubuntu higher than 13.10 or recent Debian distribution. The only supported compiler is gcc 4.9+.

  • Library for handling NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access).

    • numactl-devel in Red Hat/Fedora;
    • libnuma-dev in Debian/Ubuntu;

    Note

    On systems with NUMA support, libnuma-dev (aka numactl-devel) is a recommended dependency when –legacy-mem switch is used, and a required dependency if default memory mode is used. While DPDK will compile and run without libnuma even on NUMA-enabled systems, both usability and performance will be degraded.

  • Python, version 2.7+ or 3.2+, to use various helper scripts included in the DPDK package.

Optional Tools:

  • Intel® C++ Compiler (icc). For installation, additional libraries may be required. See the icc Installation Guide found in the Documentation directory under the compiler installation.
  • IBM® Advance ToolChain for Powerlinux. This is a set of open source development tools and runtime libraries which allows users to take leading edge advantage of IBM’s latest POWER hardware features on Linux. To install it, see the IBM official installation document.
  • libpcap headers and libraries (libpcap-devel) to compile and use the libpcap-based poll-mode driver. This driver is disabled by default and can be enabled by setting CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_PMD_PCAP=y in the build time config file.
  • libarchive headers and library are needed for some unit tests using tar to get their resources.

2.3. Running DPDK Applications

To run a DPDK application, some customization may be required on the target machine.

2.3.1. System Software

Required:

  • Kernel version >= 3.2

    The kernel version required is based on the oldest long term stable kernel available at kernel.org when the DPDK version is in development.

    The kernel version in use can be checked using the command:

    uname -r

Note

Kernel version 3.2 is no longer a kernel.org longterm stable kernel. For DPDK 19.02 the minimum required kernel will be updated to the current kernel.org oldest longterm stable supported kernel 3.16, or recent versions of common distributions, notably RHEL/CentOS 7.

  • glibc >= 2.7 (for features related to cpuset)

    The version can be checked using the ldd --version command.

  • Kernel configuration

    In the Fedora OS and other common distributions, such as Ubuntu, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the vendor supplied kernel configurations can be used to run most DPDK applications.

    For other kernel builds, options which should be enabled for DPDK include:

2.3.2. Use of Hugepages in the Linux Environment

Hugepage support is required for the large memory pool allocation used for packet buffers (the HUGETLBFS option must be enabled in the running kernel as indicated the previous section). By using hugepage allocations, performance is increased since fewer pages are needed, and therefore less Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs, high speed translation caches), which reduce the time it takes to translate a virtual page address to a physical page address. Without hugepages, high TLB miss rates would occur with the standard 4k page size, slowing performance.

2.3.2.1. Reserving Hugepages for DPDK Use

The reservation of hugepages can be performed at run time. This is done by echoing the number of hugepages required to a nr_hugepages file in the /sys/kernel/ directory corresponding to a specific page size (in Kilobytes). For a single-node system, the command to use is as follows (assuming that 1024 of 2MB pages are required):

echo 1024 > /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages

On a NUMA machine, the above command will usually divide the number of hugepages equally across all NUMA nodes (assuming there is enough memory on all NUMA nodes). However, pages can also be reserved explicitly on individual NUMA nodes using a nr_hugepages file in the /sys/devices/ directory:

echo 1024 > /sys/devices/system/node/node0/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages
echo 1024 > /sys/devices/system/node/node1/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages

Note

Some kernel versions may not allow reserving 1 GB hugepages at run time, so reserving them at boot time may be the only option. Please see below for instructions.

Alternative:

In the general case, reserving hugepages at run time is perfectly fine, but in use cases where having lots of physically contiguous memory is required, it is preferable to reserve hugepages at boot time, as that will help in preventing physical memory from becoming heavily fragmented.

To reserve hugepages at boot time, a parameter is passed to the Linux kernel on the kernel command line.

For 2 MB pages, just pass the hugepages option to the kernel. For example, to reserve 1024 pages of 2 MB, use:

hugepages=1024

For other hugepage sizes, for example 1G pages, the size must be specified explicitly and can also be optionally set as the default hugepage size for the system. For example, to reserve 4G of hugepage memory in the form of four 1G pages, the following options should be passed to the kernel:

default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=4

Note

The hugepage sizes that a CPU supports can be determined from the CPU flags on Intel architecture. If pse exists, 2M hugepages are supported; if pdpe1gb exists, 1G hugepages are supported. On IBM Power architecture, the supported hugepage sizes are 16MB and 16GB.

Note

For 64-bit applications, it is recommended to use 1 GB hugepages if the platform supports them.

In the case of a dual-socket NUMA system, the number of hugepages reserved at boot time is generally divided equally between the two sockets (on the assumption that sufficient memory is present on both sockets).

See the Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt file in your Linux source tree for further details of these and other kernel options.

2.3.2.2. Using Hugepages with the DPDK

If secondary process support is not required, DPDK is able to use hugepages without any configuration by using “in-memory” mode. Please see EAL parameters for more details.

If secondary process support is required, mount points for hugepages need to be created. On modern Linux distributions, a default mount point for hugepages is provided by the system and is located at /dev/hugepages. This mount point will use the default hugepage size set by the kernel parameters as described above.

However, in order to use hugepage sizes other than the default, it is necessary to manually create mount points for those hugepage sizes (e.g. 1GB pages).

To make the hugepages of size 1GB available for DPDK use, following steps must be performed:

mkdir /mnt/huge
mount -t hugetlbfs pagesize=1GB /mnt/huge

The mount point can be made permanent across reboots, by adding the following line to the /etc/fstab file:

nodev /mnt/huge hugetlbfs pagesize=1GB 0 0