[ovs-discuss] OVS DPDK: Failed to create memory pool for netdev

Sat Nov 2 15:43:18 UTC 2019

Hello community,

My team and I observe a strange behavior on our system with the creation of dpdk ports in OVS.
We have a CentOS 7 system with OpenvSwitch and only one single port of type ‘dpdk’ attached to a bridge. The MTU size of the DPDK port is 9216 and the reserved HugePages for OVS are 512 x 2MB-HugePages, e.g. 1GB of total HugePage memory.

Setting everything up works fine, however after I reboot my box, the dpdk port is in error state and I can observe this line in the logs (full logs attached to the mail):
2019-11-02T14:46:16.914Z|00437|netdev_dpdk|ERR|Failed to create memory pool for netdev dpdk-p0, with MTU 9216 on socket 0: Invalid argument
2019-11-02T14:46:16.914Z|00438|dpif_netdev|ERR|Failed to set interface dpdk-p0 new configuration

I figured out that by restarting the openvswitch process, the issue with the port is resolved and it is back in a working state. However, as soon as I reboot the system a second time, the port comes up in error state again.
Now, we have also observed a couple of other workarounds that I can’t really explain why they help:

  *   When there is also a VM deployed on the system that is using ports of type ‘dpdkvhostuserclient’, we never see any issues like that. (MTU size of the VM ports is 9216 by the way)
  *   When we increase the HugePage memory for OVS to 2GB, we also don’t see any issues.
  *   Lowering the MTU size of the ‘dpdk’ type port to 1500 also helps to prevent this issue.

Can anyone explain this?

We’re using the following versions:
Openvswitch: 2.9.3
DPDK: 17.11.5

Appreciate any help!
Tobias
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