N3000 FPGA OverviewΒΆ
The N3000 FPGA PAC has two Intel XL710 NICs, memory and an Intel FPGA.
StarlingX discovers and inventories the device as a NIC, with the XL710 ports available in the host port list and host interface list. Containers wanting to leverage the FPGA bind to an SR-IOV VF interface of the N3000 NIC port by creating and requesting an SR-IOV NetworkAttachmentDefinition resource for a Data Network attached to the N3000 NIC. See the post-requisites at the end of this procedure for more information.
The NICs on-board the N3000 PAC will have PCI device ID 0x0d58 for 25G configurations or 0x0cf8 for 10G configurations.
Use the Intel N3000 PAC to take advantage of the hardware acceleration provided by FPGA hardware from within containers to improve container performance across a cluster.
The Intel N3000 FPGA also supports FEC capabilities that are exposed as a PCI device that may be used by a DPDK enabled container application to perform accelerated 5G LDPC encoding and decoding operations.
The pf-bb-config package is used to statically configure the baseband device within N3000 devices. The baseband configuration file for N3000 devices is taken from https://github.com/intel/pf-bb-config/blob/v21.6/fpga_5gnr/fpga_5gnr_config_vf.cfg, and customized to assign the UL and DL queues to VF0 only. It is then applied to the enabled N3000 device, if required.
Note
The N3000 device configuration using pf-bb-config package is based only on the contents of the _fpga_5gnr_config_vf.cfg_ file regardless of the actual number of VFs configured via the system host-device-modify command.
See also
