[Starlingx-discuss] Kernel upgrade status & DPDK need be upgraded

[Khalil, Ghada]

Hi Shuicheng,
As discussed in the networking meeting yesterday, please apply a patch to the CentOS 7.6 feature branch to disable the mellanox drivers temporarily in the openvswitch package:

This is the explicit patch in STX that enables it currently:
https://github.com/openstack/stx-integ/blob/master/networking/openvswitch/centos/meta_patches/0005-enable-mlx-pmds.patch

Please see if this addresses the compile issues you are facing.

The longer term plan will be to upgrade to a new version of openvswitch which has support for DPDK 18.11. Looking at the ovs releases, it seems that the next major release is planned for mid-February.
http://docs.openvswitch.org/en/latest/internals/release-process/#release-scheduling

Please note that my team is out of the office until Jan 2. If you need help before then, please contact Forrest.

Regards,
Ghada

-----Original Message-----
From: Khalil, Ghada 
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2018 11:38 AM
To: 'Lin, Shuicheng'; starlingx-discuss at lists.starlingx.io
Subject: RE: Kernel upgrade status & DPDK need be upgraded

Hi Shuicheng,
You are correct. The Mellanox drivers are tied to DPDK as well as the kernel.
At a high level, I see no option, but to upgrade DPDK/OVS to 18.11 to align with the newer kernel and mellanox drivers. Is there a version available for ovs/ovs-dpdk that supports 18.11 yet? If not, is there information on when one would be available?

I added this as an agenda item in the next networking team meeting on Dec 20 at 9:15am Eastern Time. 
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/stx-networking

We will discuss this in more detail then. Feel free to join us.
Zoom details are on the wiki: 
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Starlingx/Meetings#0615am_PDT_.2F_1415_UTC_-_Networking_Team_Call_.28Bi-weekly.29

Regards,
Ghada

--------------
From: Lin, Shuicheng [mailto:shuicheng.lin at intel.com] 
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2018 7:55 PM
To: starlingx-discuss at lists.starlingx.io
Subject: [Starlingx-discuss] Kernel upgrade status & DPDK need be upgraded

Hi all,
We are working on kernel upgrade task recently [0].
After upgrade the kernel, we find several modules cannot pass build, due to data structure/function api change in kernel.
Here is the module list cannot pass build with the new kernel:
Mlnx-ofa_kernel
Intel-i40e
Intel-i40evf
Tpmdd
Intel-ixgbe
drbd
openvswitch

To fix the build failure, I plan to upgrade these packages to newer version, which supports CentOS 7.6.
This upgrade may cause other packages depend on these packages be upgraded also.
Take Mlnx-ofa as example, it is bound with DPDK. 
Per [1], MLNX_OFED 4.5-1.0.1.0 supports CentOS 7.6.
Per [2], DPDK should be upgraded to 18.11, while our current DPDK is 17.11, and is bound with OVS.
And OVS upgrade may affect Neutron.

I need network team to help decide the upgrade strategy of DPDK/OVS.
Thanks.

[0]: https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2004521
[1]: http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=26&mtag=linux_sw_drivers
[2]: https://doc.dpdk.org/guides-18.11/rel_notes/release_18_11.html



Best Regards
Shuicheng