2. Installing DPDK from the Ports Collection

The easiest way to get up and running with the DPDK on FreeBSD is to install it from the ports collection. Details of getting and using the ports collection are documented in the FreeBSD Handbook.

2.1. Installing the DPDK FreeBSD Port

On a system with the ports collection installed in /usr/ports, the DPDK can be installed using the commands:

cd /usr/ports/net/dpdk

make install

After the installation of the DPDK port, instructions will be printed on how to install the kernel modules required to use the DPDK. A more complete version of these instructions can be found in the sections Loading the DPDK contigmem Module and Loading the DPDK nic_uio Module. Normally, lines like those below would be added to the file /boot/loader.conf.

# Reserve 2 x 1G blocks of contiguous memory using contigmem driver:
hw.contigmem.num_buffers=2
hw.contigmem.buffer_size=1073741824
contigmem_load="YES"

# Identify NIC devices for DPDK apps to use and load nic_uio driver:
hw.nic_uio.bdfs="2:0:0,2:0:1"
nic_uio_load="YES"

Note

Please ensure that the latest patches are applied to third party libraries and software to avoid any known vulnerabilities.

2.2. Compiling and Running the Example Applications

When the DPDK has been installed from the ports collection it installs its example applications in /usr/local/share/dpdk/examples - also accessible via symlink as /usr/local/share/examples/dpdk. These examples can be compiled and run as described in Compiling and Running Sample Applications. In this case, the required environmental variables should be set as below:

RTE_SDK=/usr/local/share/dpdk
RTE_TARGET=x86_64-native-freebsd-clang

Note

To install a copy of the DPDK compiled using gcc, please download the official DPDK package from https://core.dpdk.org/download/ and install manually using the instructions given in the next chapter, Compiling the DPDK Target from Source

An example application can therefore be copied to a user’s home directory and compiled and run as below:

export RTE_SDK=/usr/local/share/dpdk

export RTE_TARGET=x86_64-native-freebsd-clang

cp -r /usr/local/share/dpdk/examples/helloworld .

cd helloworld/

gmake
  CC main.o
  LD helloworld
  INSTALL-APP helloworld
  INSTALL-MAP helloworld.map

sudo ./build//helloworld -l 0-3
EAL: Sysctl reports 8 cpus
EAL: Detected 8 lcore(s)
EAL: Detected 1 NUMA nodes
EAL: Multi-process socket /var/run/dpdk/rte/mp_socket
EAL: Selected IOVA mode 'PA'
EAL: Contigmem driver has 2 buffers, each of size 1GB
EAL: Mapped memory segment 0 @ 0x1040000000: physaddr:0x180000000, len 1073741824
EAL: Mapped memory segment 1 @ 0x1080000000: physaddr:0x1c0000000, len 1073741824
EAL: PCI device 0000:00:19.0 on NUMA socket 0
EAL:   probe driver: 8086:153b net_e1000_em
EAL:   0000:00:19.0 not managed by UIO driver, skipping
EAL: PCI device 0000:01:00.0 on NUMA socket 0
EAL:   probe driver: 8086:1572 net_i40e
EAL:   0000:01:00.0 not managed by UIO driver, skipping
EAL: PCI device 0000:01:00.1 on NUMA socket 0
EAL:   probe driver: 8086:1572 net_i40e
EAL:   0000:01:00.1 not managed by UIO driver, skipping
EAL: PCI device 0000:01:00.2 on NUMA socket 0
EAL:   probe driver: 8086:1572 net_i40e
EAL:   0000:01:00.2 not managed by UIO driver, skipping
EAL: PCI device 0000:01:00.3 on NUMA socket 0
EAL:   probe driver: 8086:1572 net_i40e
EAL:   0000:01:00.3 not managed by UIO driver, skipping
hello from core 1
hello from core 2
hello from core 3
hello from core 0

Note

To run a DPDK process as a non-root user, adjust the permissions on the /dev/contigmem and /dev/uio device nodes as described in section Running DPDK Applications Without Root Privileges

Note

For an explanation of the command-line parameters that can be passed to an DPDK application, see section Running a Sample Application.