TNSR Home+Lab ISO on KVM with Mellanox ConnectX-4 passthrough

leon.kos

Useful message for those tying to get Version: tnsr-v20.10.1-2
working under KVM using SR-IOV with Mellanox Technologies MT27710 Family working with DPDK.
The solution is to install Mellannox OFED_EN in host and most important also in KVM TNSR machine with the following commands:

shell
sudo -i
ifconfig ens7 up # manually configure internet through VLAN
ip link add link ens7 name ens7.100 type vlan id 100
ifconfig ens7.100 192.168.5.109
route add default gw 192.168.5.1
echo nameserver 192.168.5.1 > /etc/resolv.conf
yum update
yum install wget
wget http://www.mellanox.com/downloads/ofed/MLNX_EN-5.1-1.0.4.0/mlnx-en-5.1-1.0.4.0-rhel8.2-x86_64.iso
mount -o loop mlnx-en-5.1-1.0.4.0-rhel8.2-x86_64.iso /mnt/
cd /mnt
yum search perl
yum search perl-term
yum install perl-Term-ANSIColor
yum install lsof
./install --help
./install --dpdk
reboot

Although TNSR shows ConnectX-4 as Active interface DPDK configuration is now possible!

TNSR tnsr(config)# dataplane dpdk dev ?
  0000:00:03.0           Ethernet controller: Red Hat, Inc. Virtio network device
  0000:00:07.0           Ethernet controller: Mellanox Technologies MT27710 Family [ConnectX-4 Lx] ( Active Interface ens7 )
  0000:00:08.0           Ethernet controller: Mellanox Technologies MT27710 Family [ConnectX-4 Lx] ( Active Interface ens8 )
  default

The TNSR KVM instructions are quite outdated and not very useful for getting 10Gbit performance config. Therefore I am giving sample TNSR machine creation command used for my dual homed passthrough KVM:

virt-install --name TNSR --vcpus=2,sockets=1,cores=2,threads=1 \
--os-type linux --os-variant centos8 --cpu host-passthrough --ram 4096 \
--noautoconsole --graphics vnc \
--cdrom=/var/lib/libvirt/boot/TNSR_HomeLab_CentOSx86_64-20.10.1-2.iso \
--disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/tnsr.qcow2,size=5,bus=virtio,format=qcow2 \
--host-device=pci_0000_17_00_0 --host-device=pci_0000_17_00_1

dabernie

where did you get your qcow2 image ?

Ralms 0

@dabernie said in TNSR Home+Lab ISO on KVM with Mellanox ConnectX-4 passthrough:

where did you get your qcow2 image ?

Although the OP has it on an "images" folder, that refers to the Virtual Machine disk. The actual image is an .iso.