ASK (Application Solutions Kit) for LS1046A

Hardware-accelerated packet processing for NXP Layerscape LS1046A (and LS1043A) processors. This repository contains the kernel modules, userspace daemons, kernel patch stack, board device tree, and configuration needed to enable DPAA1 / FMAN fast-path offloading — turning a Linux router into a hardware-offloading one.

Together with the ASK-enabled FMAN microcode (a proprietary NXP binary, not included, v210.10.1, loaded by U-Boot before Linux boots) it offloads L2 bridging, L3 forwarding/NAT, QoS, and IPsec to the DPAA/FMAN hardware. Without the microcode the standard FMAN driver still works, but CDX will not initialize.

How ASK is consumed

ASK is not a standalone product — it is the set of components that enable DPAA1/FMAN hardware offloading on the NXP LS1046A, meant to be integrated into a Linux distribution's build system. OpenWrt, Armbian, Debian, or any Yocto image pulls ASK in as a kernel patch stack plus a handful of packages; there is no "ASK distro" and nothing here runs on its own.

The components:

• Kernel modules — cdx (the core offload engine: hardware flow tables, IPsec offload, and QoS via DPAA/FMAN), fci (control channel to the CMM daemon), auto_bridge (L2 bridge flow detection).
• Userspace — cmm (offloads netfilter conntrack flows to the classifier), dpa_app (loads the FMAN classification rules), fmc (NXP's FMAN config compiler).
• Supporting libraries — libfci, fmlib, libcli, and ASK-patched libnfnetlink / libnetfilter_conntrack (CMM's fast-path conntrack).
• Kernel side — the patches/kernel/ stack (010–110: the vendored DPAA/FMAN SDK and ASK's hooks, applied onto stock mainline 6.12) and the board device tree in dts/.
• Runtime config — FMAN port maps, PCD / soft-parser XML, module load order, and init scripts (config/, dpa_app/files/).

Reference recipes

Each component's bitbake recipe is the authoritative, self-contained description of how to build and package it — flags, dependencies, install layout. Anyone integrating ASK into another build system should read these as the reference:

Component	Recipe
cdx, fci, auto_bridge (kernel modules)	meta-ask/recipes-ask/{cdx,fci,auto-bridge}/
cmm, dpa_app, fmc (userspace)	meta-ask/recipes-ask/{cmm,dpa-app,fmc}/
libfci, fmlib, libcli (libraries)	meta-ask/recipes-ask/{libfci,fmlib,libcli}/
patched libnfnetlink / libnetfilter-conntrack	meta-ask/recipes-ask/{libnfnetlink,libnetfilter-conntrack}/
kernel + ASK patch stack	meta-ask/recipes-kernel/linux/linux-ask_6.12.bb
bootable showcase image	meta-ask/recipes-core/images/ask-image.bb

For example, OpenWrt consumes ASK by mirroring these as package/ask/* Makefiles plus a committed copy of the kernel patch series — the same components, packaged its own way.

The Yocto layer is a showcase

meta-ask is not a production distro — it exists to demonstrate how all the components build and fit together. It wires every one of them into a single bootable image that is served over the network and booted entirely in RAM (kernel + initramfs over TFTP). That means the full ASK stack comes up on a board without touching eMMC: nothing is flashed, the installed on-board system is left undisturbed, and a power-cycle returns the board to it. It is both the reference for how the pieces integrate and a fast, non-destructive way to test them on real hardware.

Building the showcase image

The meta-ask layer builds that in-RAM image. It is self-contained: it fetches its own BitBake, OpenEmbedded-core, and meta-openembedded, then builds the kernel, the ASK modules, the userspace, and an initramfs into one bootable image. Verified from scratch on a clean Debian 13 (trixie) amd64 host.

Requirements

• Debian 13 (trixie) or newer, amd64.
• Disk: an empty-sstate build uses roughly 85 GB — about 70 GB for the build tree (meta-ask/build/tmp), 13 GB of downloads, and a few GB of sstate. Provision ≥100 GB free on the build filesystem.
• RAM: 16 GB minimum, 32 GB comfortable for a parallel build. Note that a default systemd /tmp is a tmpfs sized to half of RAM; a heavily parallel native compile can exhaust a small /tmp. If you hit No space left on device while df still shows free disk, that tmpfs is the cause — grow it, or point TMPDIR at real disk.

1. Host setup (one-time)

make setup

Installs kas and BitBake's host dependencies and generates the en_US.UTF-8 locale BitBake requires (needs sudo). kas 4.8.x from Debian trixie is known-good; pipx install kas also works if you want a newer release.

2. Cache directories (required)

make setup seeds meta-ask/site.conf from site.conf.example — the real site.conf is gitignored, so it's your local, machine-specific copy. You must edit it before building. Create the cache directories first and give your build user write access:

sudo mkdir -p /srv/yocto/dl /srv/yocto/sstate
sudo chown "$(id -u):$(id -g)" /srv/yocto/dl /srv/yocto/sstate

Then point site.conf at the paths you created (and set the parallelism to your nproc):

# meta-ask/site.conf
DL_DIR            = "/srv/yocto/dl"       # downloaded tarballs (reusable)
SSTATE_DIR        = "/srv/yocto/sstate"   # shared state cache (reusable)
PARALLEL_MAKE     = "-j 24"                # set to your `nproc`
BB_NUMBER_THREADS = "24"                   # set to your `nproc`

Keep the caches outside the repo so a reclone doesn't wipe them; a warm sstate cache turns a ~40-minute build into minutes.

3. Build

make ask-image        # = cd meta-ask && kas build .config.yaml

The image lands in meta-ask/build/tmp/deploy/images/ask-ls1046a/ as Image.gz-initramfs-ask-ls1046a.bin (kernel + initramfs, ~104 MB). From an empty sstate cache the build takes ~40 minutes.

For the KASAN sanitizer (memory-error instrumentation, off by default):

KASAN=1 make ask-image

Deploying to the board

The image boots in RAM over TFTP from U-Boot on the lab board:

make stage-image      # copy the image into $TFTP_ROOT (default /srv/tftp)

Then, at the DUT's U-Boot prompt: tftpboot ${loadaddr} <name>; booti ${loadaddr} - ${fdtaddr}.

Make targets

The top-level Makefile is a thin wrapper around the kas build and the test harness — it does not build ASK components standalone.

Target	Does
make setup	install host build deps + locale (one-time, sudo)
make ask-image	build the test image via kas
make stage-image	copy the built image into the TFTP root
make deploy-agents	install the askd test agent on the WAN/LAN hosts
make ask-test	run the end-to-end pytest suite

Versioning and branches

ASK is versioned per kernel-compatibility line. In short: master is active development for the newest supported kernel; mono-6.12 is the 6.12 maintenance line; releases are tagged (mono-1.0.0). See docs/versioning.md for the full branch model.

License

Kernel modules and ASK components are licensed under GPL-2.0+. See the individual COPYING.GPL files in each component directory and the top-level LICENSE.