DPDK Open vSwitch can't access the network

Question

I'm playing with ovs-dpdk package https://github.com/01org/dpdk-ovs and one thing I don't clearly understand is how can I have OVS bridge and VMs connected to it get access to outside, ie. to the network. On a regular openvswitch the bridge device created by vswitch is 'visible' from linux and can be configured by regular tools (ifconfig, ethtool etc.), so I could create TAP interface and add it to vswitch bridge interface and assign the bridge interface IP address. However with ovs-dpdk this is not the case: any bridge created with ovs-vsctl is not avaialble in userspace linux, at least I don't see it with ifconfig or "ip link show".

Is there another method OVS-DPDK does this? Hopefully someone can shed some light for this problem. Thanks.

Answer 1

ovs-dpdk when it is using DPDK to access the NIC will take over the nic and not allow regular kernel drivers to do their thing.

This means that you will not see the interface any more from the linux host if you bind the hardware with the dpdk io driver. But you can bridge/tap/mirror inside ovs these raw dpdk interfaces in dpdk-ovs to your vm's or to another interface which is visible to the kernel's regular drivers. You just can't do it on the dpdk owned interfaces.

The whole point of integrating dpdk into ovs is to bypass all the kernel drivers and get packets to/from the vswitch as fast as possible so it can route them natively through to your VM's and other local interfaces as you set in your bridge configuration.