VPP/How To Connect A PCI Interface To VPP

Introduction

In this tutorial you will learn how to connect a PCI interface to VPP.

Starting from Setting Up Your Dev Environment

You can try this exercise using the Vagrant file provided in vpp/build-root/vagrant . To get started there, go to Setting Up Your Dev Environment (if you have not already).

Setting the number of NICs

Once you can get this Vagrant working, set the environment variable VPP_VAGRANT_NICS to the number of additional NICs you would like, in this tutorial, we will use the example of 2.

Example:

VPP_VAGRANT_NICS=2

If you have already created a VM for this Vagrant, you will need to destroy and recreate it for the changes to take effect:

export vagrant destroy -f;vagrant up --provider virtualbox

Capturing the IP information

The Vagrant sets up additional NICs as 'DHCP'. This means they get an IP assigned by DHCP. You are going to want to capture the information about them so you can interact with the network they are connected to correctly.

Example:

vagrant@localhost:~$ ip address
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default 
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:b1:94:b1 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.0.2.15/24 brd 10.0.2.255 scope global eth0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:feb1:94b1/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:55:e1:eb brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 172.28.128.3/24 brd 172.28.128.255 scope global eth1
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe55:e1eb/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
4: eth2: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:27:e6:13:79 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 172.28.128.4/24 brd 172.28.128.255 scope global eth2
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fee6:1379/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

So in this example we can pick off the ip addresses:

1. eth1 - 172.28.128.3/24
2. eth2 - 172.28.128.4/24

We'll need to save those for assignment to the VPP interfaces later.

Configuring VPP to use the additional NICs

Getting PCI information for additional NICs

To 'whitelist' an interface with VPP (ie, tell it to grab that NIC) we need to first find the interfaces PCI address.

Example:

vagrant@localhost:~$ sudo lshw -class network -businfo
Bus info          Device     Class      Description
===================================================
pci@0000:00:03.0  eth0       network    82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
pci@0000:00:08.0  eth1       network    82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
pci@0000:00:09.0  eth2       network    82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller

In this case we can see:

1. eth1 - 0000:00:08.0
2. eth2 - 0000:00:09.0

Edit startup.conf

To configure VPP to use eth1 and eth2 using DPDK, edit

/etc/vpp/startup.conf

And change its dpdk section to contain 'dev' entries for the PCI bus information you captured in the previous step.

Example:

dpdk {
  socket-mem 1024
  dev 0000:00:08.0
  dev 0000:00:09.0
}

Restart VPP

Restart VPP

sudo restart vpp

Taking your new NICs for a spin

Seeing new VPP NICs

vagrant@localhost:~$ sudo vppctl show int
              Name               Idx       State          Counter          Count     
GigabitEthernet0/8/0              5        down      
GigabitEthernet0/9/0              6        down      
local0                            0        down      
pg/stream-0                       1        down      
pg/stream-1                       2        down      
pg/stream-2                       3        down      
pg/stream-3                       4        down 

You can see the new interfaces:

1. GigabitEthernet0/8/0 - corresponding to PCI address 0000:00:08.0 which corresponds to eth1
2. GigabitEthernet0/9/0 - corresponding to PCI address 0000:00:09.0 which corresponds to eth2

Assigning IP address to VPP interfaces

vagrant@localhost:~$ sudo vppctl set int ip address GigabitEthernet0/8/0 172.28.128.3/24
vagrant@localhost:~$ sudo vppctl set int ip address GigabitEthernet0/9/0 172.28.128.4/24