Re: tcpdump support in DPDK 2.3

[Aaron Conole <aconole@redhat.com>]

Morten Brørup <mb@smartsharesystems.com> writes:
> I noticed a discussion about support for tcpdump in DPDK 2.3.
>
>  
>
> Please consider which scenarios you want to support:

Morten,

Thanks for your input here. I think there's a different way of
approaching this: "debuggability" (sorry, it's not grammatical).

The end goal of having tcpdump is not just for another feature checklist
that folks can just say "okay, welp we got that too!" When something is
going wrong with communications, being able to fire up tcpdump without
disturbing anything else is hugely important to isolating issues. I
think that's an important scenario, and may be enabled by one or more of
the features you've listed.

There are other scenarios as well, that you hinted at - using existing
applications built around libpcap. That is important to enable as well,
but I think the biggest hurdle to getting anyone to use a DPDK enabled
application will always be: "How much work do I have to do when
something goes wrong?"

There are certainly things that should belong in an application. But I
think easy enabling of a tcpdump capable mechanism is DPDK's
responsibility. After all, it's a networking stack, right?

Whichever combination of features is used, we shouldn't really
discourage them, I think. Any way the user can debug something using
familiar workflows and tools is a way that dpdk-dev doesn't need to get
involved.

Just my $.02, anyway.

Thanks,
-Aaron