21. ICE Poll Mode Driver

The ice PMD (librte_pmd_ice) provides poll mode driver support for 10/25 Gbps Intel® Ethernet 810 Series Network Adapters based on the Intel Ethernet Controller E810.

21.1. Prerequisites

• Identifying your adapter using Intel Support and get the latest NVM/FW images.
• Follow the DPDK Getting Started Guide for Linux to setup the basic DPDK environment.
• To get better performance on Intel platforms, please follow the “How to get best performance with NICs on Intel platforms” section of the Getting Started Guide for Linux.

21.2. Pre-Installation Configuration

21.2.1. 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_ICE_PMD (default y)

  Toggle compilation of the librte_pmd_ice driver.

• CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_ICE_DEBUG_* (default n)

  Toggle display of generic debugging messages.

• CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_ICE_RX_ALLOW_BULK_ALLOC (default y)

  Toggle bulk allocation for RX.

• CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_ICE_16BYTE_RX_DESC (default n)

  Toggle to use a 16-byte RX descriptor, by default the RX descriptor is 32 byte.

21.2.2. Runtime Config Options

• Maximum Number of Queue Pairs

  The maximum number of queue pairs is decided by HW. If not configured, APP uses the number from HW. Users can check the number by calling the API rte_eth_dev_info_get. If users want to limit the number of queues, they can set a smaller number using EAL parameter like max_queue_pair_num=n.

21.3. Driver compilation and testing

Refer to the document compiling and testing a PMD for a NIC for details.

21.4. Features

21.4.1. Vector PMD

Vector PMD for RX and TX path are selected automatically. The paths are chosen based on 2 conditions.

• CPU On the X86 platform, the driver checks if the CPU supports AVX2. If it’s supported, AVX2 paths will be chosen. If not, SSE is chosen.
• Offload features The supported HW offload features are described in the document ice_vec.ini. If any not supported features are used, ICE vector PMD is disabled and the normal paths are chosen.

21.4.2. Malicious driver detection (MDD)

It’s not appropriate to send a packet, if this packet’s destination MAC address is just this port’s MAC address. If SW tries to send such packets, HW will report a MDD event and drop the packets.

The APPs based on DPDK should avoid providing such packets.

21.5. Sample Application Notes

21.5.1. Vlan filter

Vlan filter only works when Promiscuous mode is off.

To start testpmd, and add vlan 10 to port 0:

./app/testpmd -l 0-15 -n 4 -- -i
...

testpmd> rx_vlan add 10 0

21.6. Limitations or Known issues

The Intel E810 requires a programmable pipeline package be downloaded by the driver to support normal operations. The E810 has a limited functionality built in to allow PXE boot and other use cases, but the driver must download a package file during the driver initialization stage. The file must be in the /lib/firmware/intel/ice/ddp directory and it must be named ice.pkg. A symbolic link to this file is also ok. The same package file is used by both the kernel driver and the DPDK PMD.

21.6.1. 19.02 limitation

Ice code released in 19.02 is for evaluation only.