On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 5:09 PM Jerin Jacob [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 8:15 PM David Marchand
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

OVS and some other applications have been hacking into DPDK internals to
fake EAL threads and avoid performance penalty of only having non-EAL
threads.

This series proposes to add a new type of lcores and maps those external
threads to such lcores.
Those threads won't run the DPDK eal mainloop and as a consequence part of
the EAL threads API cannot work.

Having new lcores appearing during the process lifetime is not expected
by some DPDK components. This is addressed by notifying of such lcore
hotplug.

This patchset has still some more work (like refusing new lcore type in
incompatible EAL threads API, updating the documentation and adding unit
tests) but I am sending it anyway as I would like to get this in for
20.08.

Cool feature.

Is mempool's lcore local cache working for external cores with this scheme?

Yes, as it is stateless, all we need is a unique lcore_id in [0,
RTE_MAX_LCORE-1] range.
We could imagine flushing such caches on unregistering.

And we can fix other mempool drivers like the bucket driver.

-- 
David Marchand