On November 27, 2022, the official DPDK community issued DPDK Release 22.11, starting from which DPDK began to support LoongArch. As the community pushes forward the DPDK project, LoongArch has become another independent instruction set architecture (ISA) supported by DPDK, following X86, PowerPC, ARM, and RISC-V.

Official Announcement

1. DPDK's Relevance to Loongson

Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open-source project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network card drivers based on the polling mode. DPDK can accelerate network I/O, playing an important role in improving network throughput and reducing network latency.

DPDK offers a set of efficient packet processing libraries in user space and a complete application programming framework, enabling faster development of high-speed data packet networking applications. Many popular Linux distributions include support for DPDK as part of their standard packages. LoongArch-based DPDK runtime and development environments can be installed through software package management tools on Loongnix-Server and Loongnix-Desktop systems maintained by Loongson Technology.

Diagram of DPDK Architecture (sourced from the Internet)

Benefits Brought About by DPDK Support

After DPDK supports LoongArch, users can directly run and develop DPDK applications on physical machines based on LoongArch64, which facilitates the testing and development of DPDK-based applications and enhances the efficiency of software development. Users can not only compile and test DPDK programs natively on machines supporting LS3A5000 and 3C5000, but also cross-compile LoongArch DPDK on the X86 architecture. This feature facilitates the development of network data packet processing products that support multiple architectures.

2. Preliminary Work of Loongson's Team

To add support for LoongArch to DPDK, Loongson's technical team has gone through eight iterations of the architecture. During the iteration, the community was particularly concerned with the support of LoongArch DPDK CI. After research and communication with the community, Loongson's technical team provided the community with a DPDK CI node running on the LoongArch platform and more test results for reference in patch integration.