LS1012A - Packet Forwarding Engine ?

[jindrichbrett]

Hello NXP guys,

Can you share with me reference manual for packet forwarding engine please ?

Or whom I should ask for it please ?

It's for one our customer. they are before decision which processor they should use, but they need it.

Thank you

BR

Jindrich

[alexeysevastyan]

Hello,

I have a question about how PFE working with Wi-fi PCIe module.

Does the LS1012A PFE engine supports the hardware offload path between Ethernet ports and PCIe port?

ASK software document LS1012A ASK RN ASK 7.0.0  part 23.2.3 has performance results of PCIe 4x4 module with wifi offload but CPU load is quite.

What CPU load should be expected in case of 1000 Mbps bidirectional wifi transfer?

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,

Alexey

[thoppe]

Hi, I have a follow up question on this:

If the pfe driver is a binary blob as you mention, will I be able to use the Ethernet ports without loading it or will they only work with the pfe drivers?

If I were to build a board based on the LS1012A, how can I be sure that you will support future Kernel versions with the pfe driver (especially I can only use the Ethernet ports with the pfe drivers)?

BG

[srinivasreddyre]

Hi Peter,

I have built yocto  fsl-image-full from LS1012A-SDK-SOURCE-20161230. kernel detects eth0 and eth1 interfaces, a link is also detected on both interfaces, but packets between the board and a peer can not be sent or  received.

and encountered the same warning as you mentioned.

[ 7.728347] pe_load_ddr_section: load address(3fb0000) and elf file address(ffff0000003fb000) rcvd
[ 7.761701] PFE binary version: pfe_ls1012a_00_3-3-g1fa4da1-dirty]

[ 7.767806] pfe_firmware_init: class firmware loaded 0xa60 0xc3010000
[ 7.774264] pfe_load_elf
[ 7.777815] WARNING: PFE firmware binaries from incompatible version

So, I have used the .elf file from the below site and there was not warning message, but there is no packet flow between peer and board. 

pfe_firmware - vendor/mindspeed/drivers - Git at Google 

Nxp folks, any inputs regarding the below 

Does the PFE  is tested with yocto  source LS1012A-SDK-SOURCE-20161230-yocto.iso ? 

Could you please refer me, which document describes about "how to work with PFE and cmm" and what are the configuration need to enable Ethernet interface on LS1012ARDB ? or configure PFE to work properly ? 

[petervollmer]

Hi Srinivas,

I could solve my problem by stopping in the u-boot boot prompt and issuing the command

=> pfe stop

Stopping PFE...

=> run bootcmd

After this , without replacing the pfe firmware blob, I get functional eth0 and eth1 interfaces (ip link set dev eth0 up; ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.0.0 , etc. ... ) . I still see the warning regarding the invalid pfe firmware blob, but it doesnt seem to matter.

Best regards

Peter

[srinivasreddyre]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your inputs..

After stopping PFE at u-boot, Ethernet interface(eth0 and eth1) is working.

[petervollmer]

Hi,

I might have the same problem when building yocto  fsl-image-core from LS1012A-SDK-SOURCE-20161230. The kernel detects eth0 and eth1 interfaces, a link is also detected on both interfaces, but packets between the board and a peer can not be sent or  received (checked with tcpdump).

During boot this log snippet indicates a wrong pfe firmware blob version:

6.684741] pfe_hif_lib_init
[ 6.687818] pfe_hif_init
[ 6.690350] pfe_hif_alloc_descr
[ 7.718699] pfe_hif_init_buffers
[ 7.722140] pfe_firmware_init
[ 7.725773] pfe_load_elf
[ 7.728347] pe_load_ddr_section: load address(3fb0000) and elf file address(ffff0000003fb000) rcvd
[ 7.761701] PFE binary version: pfe_ls1012a_00_3-3-g1fa4da1-dirty
[ 7.767806] pfe_firmware_init: class firmware loaded 0xa60 0xc3010000
[ 7.774264] pfe_load_elf
[ 7.777815] WARNING: PFE firmware binaries from incompatible version
[ 7.784187] pfe_firmware_init: tmu firmware loaded 0x200
[ 7.789522] pfe_ctrl_init
[ 7.792553] pfe_ctrl_init finished
[ 7.795974] pfe_eth_init
[ 7.798547] pfe_eth_mdio_init

root@ls1012ardb:~# md5sum /lib/firmware/*.elf
1a2c3f8e9876987e80ddf7d2d8b38f06 /lib/firmware/ppfe_class_ls1012a.elf
c4ab3ed7c89431a4bf871ca073c15ed0 /lib/firmware/ppfe_tmu_ls1012a.elf

Is this maybe the reason for the non-working network interfaces ?

Best Regards

Peter

[r8070z]

Have a great day,

In general, PFE's fast packet processing features will match whatever the Linux networking stack is doing. As we provide PFE as a binary blob, we don't document the details of PFE structure. PFE works alongside our Linux software, and in particular our user space application 'conntrack monitor module', cmm. We do document how to work with PFE and cmm in the SDK Programming Guide. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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[srinivasreddyre]

Hi Serguei Podiatchev,

I am using yocto source LS1012A-SDK-SOURCE-20161230-yocto.iso for my development on LS1012ARDB.

With the yocto build images board booted but Ethernet interface is not working. 

Does the PFE  is tested with yocto  source LS1012A-SDK-SOURCE-20161230-yocto.iso ? 

Could you please refer me, which document describes about "how to work with PFE and cmm" and what are the configuration need to enable Ethernet interface on LS1012ARDB