Using DPDK on embedded RISC-V cores of a NIC

Data-path accelerator (DPA) is an NVIDIA BlueField-3 subsystem that consists of a large number of RISC-V cores integrated with the NIC fabric. DPA cannot comprehensively host DPDK, because DPA is running an RTOS without any conventional services except scheduling. Besides, DPDK core abstractions are suboptimal for DPA or have limited use there. On the other hand, it is desired to run advanced and well-tested DPDK algorithms on DPA. Doing so means running DPDK control plane and data plane code on separate HW and in very different environments. We describe the needed adjustments to DPDK libraries to do so and measure the performance of DPDK code running on DPA. We also outline and discuss the gaps that DPDK could overcome to allow its use in such heterogeneous environments.