20. ENETC4 Poll Mode Driver

The ENETC4 NIC PMD (librte_net_enetc) provides poll mode driver support for the inbuilt NIC found in multiple NXP new generation SoCs.

More information can be found at NXP Official Website.

This section provides an overview of the NXP ENETC4 and how it is integrated into the DPDK.

20.1. ENETC4 Overview

ENETC4 is a PCI Integrated End Point (IEP). IEP implements peripheral devices in a SoC such that software sees them as PCIe device. ENETC4 is an evolution of BDR (Buffer Descriptor Ring) based networking IPs.

This infrastructure simplifies adding support for IEP and facilitates in following:

  • Device discovery and location

  • Resource requirement discovery and allocation (e.g. interrupt assignment, device register address)

  • Event reporting

20.2. Supported ENETC4 SoCs

  • i.MX95

  • i.MX943

20.3. NIC Driver (PMD)

The ENETC4 PMD is a traditional DPDK PMD that bridges the DPDK framework and ENETC4 internal drivers, supporting both Virtual Functions (VFs) and Physical Functions (PF). Key functionality includes:

  • Driver registration: The device vendor table is registered in the PCI subsystem.

  • Device discovery: The DPDK framework scans the PCI bus for connected devices, triggering the ENETC4 driver’s probe function.

  • Initialization: The probe function configures basic device registers and sets up Buffer Descriptor (BD) rings.

  • Receive processing: Upon packet reception, the BD Ring status bit is set, facilitating packet processing.

  • Transmission: Packet transmission precedes reception, ensuring efficient data transfer.

20.4. Prerequisites

There are three main pre-requisites for executing ENETC4 PMD on ENETC4 compatible boards:

  1. ARM64 Toolchain

    For example, the *aarch64* ARM toolchain.

  2. Linux Kernel

    It can be obtained from NXP’s Github hosting.

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

  • NXP Linux LF

    NXP Linux LF refers to NXP’s Linux Factory releases, which are specific Linux distributions and Board Support Packages (BSPs) provided by NXP for their i.MX family of applications processors and other embedded platforms.

    i.MX LF release and related information can be obtained from: LF Refer section: Linux Current Release.

20.5. Driver compilation and testing

Follow instructions available in the document compiling and testing a PMD for a NIC to launch testpmd.