44. NBL Poll Mode Driver

The NBL PMD (librte_net_nbl) provides poll mode driver support for 10/25/50/100/200 Gbps Nebulamatrix Series Network Adapters.

44.1. Features

Features of the NBL PMD are:

  • Multiple queues for Tx and Rx

  • Receiver Side Scaling (RSS). Currently does not support user-configured RSS and only supports packet spraying via RSS.

  • Jumbo frames

44.2. Supported NICs

The following Nebulamatrix device models are supported by the same nbl driver:

  • S1205CQ-A00CHT

  • S1105AS-A00CHT

  • S1055AS-A00CHT

  • S1052AS-A00CHT

  • S1051AS-A00CHT

  • S1045XS-A00CHT

  • S1205CQ-A00CSP

  • S1055AS-A00CSP

  • S1052AS-A00CSP

44.3. Linux Prerequisites

This driver relies on kernel drivers for resources allocations and initialization. The following dependencies are not part of DPDK and must be installed separately:

  • Kernel modules

    They provide low level device drivers that manage actual hardware initialization and resources sharing with user-space processes.

    Unlike most other PMDs, these modules must remain loaded and bound to their devices:

    • nbl_core: hardware driver managing Ethernet kernel network devices.

Because the nbl_core kernel driver code has not been upstreamed to the Linux kernel community, it cannot be provided by standard Linux distributions. However, the nbl_core kernel driver has been upstreamed to the openEuler and Anolis communities. You can obtain the nbl_core code from the following links:

openEuler community:

Anolis community:

Alternatively, you can contact us to obtain the nbl_core code and installation package.

44.4. Coexistence Between DPDK And Kernel Driver

When the device is bound to the nbl_core driver and IOMMU is in passthrough mode, it is necessary to force I/O virtual address (IOVA) to be mapped to physical address (PA) with the EAL command line option --iova-mode=pa.

Only PF supports coexistence between DPDK and kernel driver; VF does not.

44.5. Prerequisites

  1. Follow the DPDK Getting Started Guide for Linux to setup the basic DPDK environment.

  2. NBL PMD requires the vfio-pci kernel driver. The igb_uio and uio_pci_generic drivers are not supported.

    Insert the vfio-pci kernel module using the command modprobe vfio-pci. Please make sure that IOMMU is enabled in your system, or use vfio-pci in noiommu mode:

    echo 1 > /sys/module/vfio/parameters/enable_unsafe_noiommu_mode

    Note that VF requires vfio-pci in noiommu mode when no IOMMU is available on the system.

  3. Bind the intended NBL device to vfio-pci.

  4. Learn about Nebulamatrix Series NICs.

44.6. Limitations or Known Issues

  • 32-bit architectures are not supported.

  • Windows and BSD are not supported yet.

  • Multiple processes are not supported.