Provided by: dpdk_17.11.10-0ubuntu0.2_amd64 
NAME
dpdk-devbind - check device status and bind/unbind them from drivers
The dpdk-devbind tool is a Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) utility that helps binding and unbinding
devices from specific drivers. As well as checking their status in that regard.
RUNNING THE APPLICATION
The tool has a number of command line options:
dpdk-devbind [options] DEVICE1 DEVICE2 ....
OPTIONS
• --help, --usage
Display usage information and quit
• -s, --status
Print the current status of all known network interfaces. For each device, it displays the PCI
domain, bus, slot and function, along with a text description of the device. Depending upon whether
the device is being used by a kernel driver, the igb_uio driver, or no driver, other relevant
information will be displayed: - the Linux interface name e.g. if=eth0 - the driver being used e.g.
drv=igb_uio - any suitable drivers not currently using that device e.g. unused=igb_uio NOTE: if this
flag is passed along with a bind/unbind option, the status display will always occur after the other
operations have taken place.
• -b driver, --bind=driver
Select the driver to use or "none" to unbind the device
• -u, --unbind
Unbind a device (Equivalent to -b none)
• --force
By default, devices which are used by Linux - as indicated by having routes in the routing table -
cannot be modified. Using the --force flag overrides this behavior, allowing active links to be
forcibly unbound. WARNING: This can lead to loss of network connection and should be used with
caution.
WARNING:
Due to the way VFIO works, there are certain limitations to which devices can be used with VFIO.
Mainly it comes down to how IOMMU groups work. Any Virtual Function device can be used with VFIO on
its own, but physical devices will require either all ports bound to VFIO, or some of them bound to
VFIO while others not being bound to anything at all.
If your device is behind a PCI-to-PCI bridge, the bridge will then be part of the IOMMU group in which
your device is in. Therefore, the bridge driver should also be unbound from the bridge PCI device for
VFIO to work with devices behind the bridge.
WARNING:
While any user can run the dpdk-devbind.py script to view the status of the network ports, binding or
unbinding network ports requires root privileges.
EXAMPLES
To display current device status:
dpdk-devbind --status
To bind eth1 from the current driver and move to use igb_uio:
dpdk-devbind --bind=igb_uio eth1
To unbind 0000:01:00.0 from using any driver:
dpdk-devbind -u 0000:01:00.0
To bind 0000:02:00.0 and 0000:02:00.1 to the ixgbe kernel driver:
dpdk-devbind -b ixgbe 02:00.0 02:00.1
To check status of all network ports, assign one to the igb_uio driver and check status again:
# Check the status of the available devices.
dpdk-devbind --status
Network devices using DPDK-compatible driver
============================================
<none>
Network devices using kernel driver
===================================
0000:0a:00.0 '82599ES 10-Gigabit' if=eth2 drv=ixgbe unused=
# Bind the device to igb_uio.
sudo dpdk-devbind -b igb_uio 0000:0a:00.0
# Recheck the status of the devices.
dpdk-devbind --status
Network devices using DPDK-compatible driver
============================================
0000:0a:00.0 '82599ES 10-Gigabit' drv=igb_uio unused=