This page holds notes for configuring and using REgeX engine on Bluefield-2.

RXPbench

RXPbench is a benchmarking tool to compare pattern matching ability between hardware acceleration by REgex engine and software acceleration by Hyperscan.

Update Mellanox Driver

shaofeng@host:~/$ wget https://www.mellanox.com/page/mlnx_ofed_eula?mtag=linux_sw_drivers&mrequest=downloads&mtype=ofed&mver=MLNX_OFED-5.8-1.1.2.1&mname=MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.8-1.1.2.1-ubuntu18.04-x86_64.tgz
shaofeng@host:~/$ sudo tar -zxvf MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.8-1.1.2.1-ubuntu18.04-x86_64.tgz
shaofeng@host:~/$ sudo ./MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.8-1.1.2.1-ubuntu18.04-x86_64/mlnxofedinstall --auto-add-kernel-support --force --skip-unsupported-devices-check
shaofeng@host:~/$ sudo /etc/init.d/openibd restart

Note: an older version of mellanox driver may cause runtime error due to lack of some dynamic libraries.

Install DPDK

RXPbench works with DPDK. Make sure DPDK is installed system wide before installing RXPbench.

shaofeng@host:~$ wget http://fast.dpdk.org/rel/dpdk-20.11.6.tar.xz 
shaofeng@host:~$ tar xJf dpdk-20.11.6.tar.xz 
shaofeng@host:~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-pyelftools libnuma-dev python3-pip 
shaofeng@host:~$ sudo pip3 install meson ninja 
shaofeng@host:~$ cd dpdk-stable-20.11.6
shaofeng@host:~$ meson -Ddisable_drivers=regex/octeontx2 build 
shaofeng@host:~$ cd build 
shaofeng@host:~$ ninja -j 32 
shaofeng@host:~$ sudo ninja install 
shaofeng@host:~$ sudo ldconfig

Install Hyperscan

  • Install hyperscan and hyperscan-dev
# On ubuntu 18.04
shaofeng@host:~$ apt install libhyperscan4 libhyperscan-dev

(Optional)Install DOCA

DOCA can be installed to support doca-regex feature of RXPbench. Clean version of RXPbench(supports dpdk-regex and hyperscan) does not need doca sdk and runtime.

Install RXPbench

RXPbench will be installed when installing doca-tools.

RXPBench :: NVIDIA DOCA SDK Documentation

Compile RXPbench

RXPbench can also be compiled from source.

Note: newest version of doca may not be compatible with RXPbench. And directly compiling from source may also fail even if doca-runtime, doca-sdk are installed. An alternative is to delete all doca-related parts from the source code to get a clean version of doca. This version is not capable of using doca-regex device but will still work with dpdk-regex and hyperscan

Using RXPbench

RXPbench runs with DPDK. So its parameters have two parts: 1) DPDK EAL 2) its own parameters.

DPDK EAL

The network interface and lcores to be used must be on the same numa node. And the numa node must have available hugepages

  • Check the pci bdf of a specific interface
shaofeng@host:~/$ realpath /sys/class/net/<dev>/device
shaofeng@host:~/$ realpath /sys/class/net/<dev>

These are symbolic links pointing to /sys/devices/....

  • Check the numa node of network interface and enable hugepage
shaofeng@host:~/$ cat /sys/class/net/<dev>/device/numanode
shaofeng@host:~/$ echo 8192 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/node/node0/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages

Other parameters

Details can be found in NVIDIA DOCA RXPBench User Guide.

An example:

shaofeng@host:~/$ rxpbench -D "-l5,6 -n 1 -a 03:00.0,class=regex" --input-mode text_file -f ../../datasets/shakespeare.txt -d rxp -r ./build/snort3_pcre.rof2.binary -c 1 -s 10 -l 2048

Related links: