Re: [PATCH] ntnic: add PMD driver

2016-08-29 06:22, Finn Christensen:

From: Stephen Hemminger [mailto:stephen@networkplumber.org]

quoted

What is the license of this driver suite?

The driver suite is a closed-source driver, which is not free downloadable.

quoted

IMHO the upstream DPDK shouldn't be a platform for non-free driver suites.

This is our first steps towards opensource, and our upcoming NIC is
partly build on HW and SW from our Accelerator products.
And since we already bypasses the kernel effectively in our driver,
this first solution for a DPDK PMD driver, has been built on top of
that software suite.
We like the idea of opensource, but we will need to do the transition
stepwise, considering our NIC product.

I think the first step should be to free the lowest level, here the
code you build your drivers on.

We have seen large performance improvements (x4-x7 times with 64 byte
packets compared to a std NIC in a phy-ovs-vm-ovs-phy setup utilizing
a modified DPDK), and this is the main motivation to go forward and
try to push our contribution to DPDK upstream.
This is the first step of contributions that we want to make.
This DPDK PMD solution is not compileable unless you have our driver.

Not being able to compile the PMD is a real problem for maintenance.
The PMD would be considered as dead code, so is forbidden.

We may need to make that possible, so that a free downloadable driver
can be retrieved.

Once this is said, we thought that the DPDK was BSD licensed and I must
admit that we have failed to see this limitation that you are mentioning.
Is there another license or agreement text that we need to read?

Maybe you'll find some interesting parts in the contributing guide.
But honestly, I think you have already done the right thing in your case:
you sent some code and open the discussion :)
Now you just need to enable a free compilation environment for your patch.
Thanks