Testing VF/PF code

[Harry Schmalzbauer]

Am 30.05.2018 um 16:45 schrieb Ryan Stone:
> On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 12:58 PM Sean Bruno <sbruno at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Does anyone have a process for testing the VF drivers (ixgbe igb, etc)
>> in FreeBSD without actually firing up linux to instantiate a VM or using
>> EC2?
> We have native support for creating VFs for ixl and ixgbe (and cxgbe).
> For igb you're out of luck (but SR-IOV on igb is kind of a waste of
> time anyway)

I'd like to note that I'm strongly missing SR-IOV for if_igb(4) and I 
don't consider it as a waste of time, speaking of the time needed for 
the setup – not the time to make the code happen; that's nothing I can 
achive (not even estimate) so I won't try to judge about the sense of 
that time relation...

82576 is a wonderful piece of hardware (mostly true for i350 also) and 
I'm missing the ability to use VFs for jails and bhyve(8) likewise with 
these NICs.
There are still many appliances that don't need 10GE rates and could 
easily cope with FastEthernet rates. For such appliances, 
security/design considerations have much more weight than throughput, 
which VFs would greatly support implementation simplicity/consistency.
So igbv(4) is on top of my christmas wishlist ;-)
Two or three of the 2-port cards and a LACP switch-stack (GbE) make a 
nice platform for a dozend VMs/jails – affordable by means of financial 
and electrical power budget likewise.

No tech aspects/justification here, just my experience based opinion.

Thanks,

-harry