MLE presents an initial DPDK driver for the corundum multi-queue network interface card (mqnic). The driver is available via the respective github repository of Missing Link Electronics.
DPDK is the acronym for Data Plane Development Toolkit and it consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. To enable packet reception and transmission, a driver is required to integrate various NICs into the DPDK.
Corundum mqnic is a project aiming at providing a fully open source FPGA based in network compute platform, comprising Linux drivers and gateware supporting various FPGA vendors, families and devices.
The Missing Link Electronics DPDK Driver for the Corundum mqnic now enables a fully open source development environment for high-performance network processing research. This may involve new hardware software partitioning as, for the first time, both the hardware and the software side are available as open source.
The driver is available for multiple dpdk-stable versions 22.11, 21.11 and 20.11 and supports multiple interfaces per device. It has been tested against corundum version 0965c77 using a ZCU106 implementation featuring 2x 10 GbE interfaces and a custom Fidus Sidewinder-100 implementation featuring 8x 10G interfaces. The tests are based on the DPDK forwarding example and an iperf client and server running on two additional machines, connected to one of the network interfaces implemented by corundum, each.