From e39d9b63664ae44af6214fa236cd989850a50833 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Anatoly Burakov Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2019 17:05:51 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] doc: clarify libnuma requirement for NUMA systems Since 18.05, libnuma is pretty much required on Linux when using non-legacy mode, because without it, we cannot know where our hugepages are located [1]. In legacy mode, libnuma is not required because we can still sort pages by sockets, as we use pagemap lookup method to figure out socket ID's for pages. So, document libnuma as required for NUMA systems and non-legacy mode. [1] https://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2018-December/120490.html Fixes: 6b42f75632f0 ("eal: enable non-legacy memory mode") Cc: stable@dpdk.org Signed-off-by: Anatoly Burakov Acked-by: Kevin Traynor --- doc/guides/linux_gsg/sys_reqs.rst | 9 +++++++++ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+) diff --git a/doc/guides/linux_gsg/sys_reqs.rst b/doc/guides/linux_gsg/sys_reqs.rst index 8ec3af4913..d0cb66f6bb 100644 --- a/doc/guides/linux_gsg/sys_reqs.rst +++ b/doc/guides/linux_gsg/sys_reqs.rst @@ -70,6 +70,15 @@ Compilation of the DPDK * libnuma-dev in Debian/Ubuntu; + .. note:: + + On systems with NUMA support, `libnuma-dev` (aka `numactl-devel`) + is a recommended dependency when `--legacy-mem` switch is used, + and a *required* dependency if default memory mode is used. + While DPDK will compile and run without `libnuma` + even on NUMA-enabled systems, + both usability and performance will be degraded. + * Python, version 2.7+ or 3.2+, to use various helper scripts included in the DPDK package.