21. ABI and API Deprecation
See the guidelines document for details of the ABI policy. API and ABI deprecation notices are to be posted here.
21.1. Deprecation Notices
meson: The minimum supported version of meson for configuring and building DPDK will be increased to v0.47.1 (from 0.41) from DPDK 19.05 onwards. For those users with a version earlier than 0.47.1, an updated copy of meson can be got using the
pip
, orpip3
, tool for downloading python packages.kvargs: The function
rte_kvargs_process
will get a new parameter for returning key match count. It will ease handling of no-match case.eal: The function
rte_eal_remote_launch
will return new error codes after read or write error on the pipe, instead of callingrte_panic
.eal: both declaring and identifying devices will be streamlined in v18.11. New functions will appear to query a specific port from buses, classes of device and device drivers. Device declaration will be made coherent with the new scheme of device identification. As such,
rte_devargs
device representation will change.The enum
rte_devtype
was used to identify a bus and will disappear.Functions previously deprecated will change or disappear:
rte_eal_devargs_type_count
eal: The
rte_logs
struct and global symbol will be made private to remove it from the externally visible ABI and allow it to be updated in the future.dpaa2: removal of
rte_dpaa2_memsegs
structure which has been replaced by a pa-va search library. This structure was earlier being used for holding memory segments used by dpaa2 driver for faster pa->va translation. This structure would be made internal (or removed if all dependencies are cleared) in future releases.ethdev: the legacy filter API, including
rte_eth_dev_filter_supported()
,rte_eth_dev_filter_ctrl()
as well as filter types MACVLAN, ETHERTYPE, FLEXIBLE, SYN, NTUPLE, TUNNEL, FDIR, HASH and L2_TUNNEL, is superseded by the generic flow API (rte_flow) in PMDs that implement the latter. Target release for removal of the legacy API will be defined once most PMDs have switched to rte_flow.ethdev: Update API functions returning
void
to returnint
with negative errno values to indicate various error conditions (e.g. invalid port ID, unsupported operation, failed operation):rte_eth_dev_stop
rte_eth_dev_close
ethdev: New offload flags
DEV_RX_OFFLOAD_FLOW_MARK
will be added in 19.11. This will allow application to enable or disable PMDs from updatingrte_mbuf::hash::fdir
. This scheme will allow PMDs to avoid writes torte_mbuf
fields on Rx and thereby improve Rx performance if application wishes do so. In 19.11 PMDs will still update the field even when the offload is not enabled.cryptodev: support for using IV with all sizes is added, J0 still can be used but only when IV length in following structs
rte_crypto_auth_xform
,rte_crypto_aead_xform
is set to zero. When IV length is greater or equal to one it means it represents IV, when is set to zero it means J0 is used directly, in this case 16 bytes of J0 need to be passed.sched: To allow more traffic classes, flexible mapping of pipe queues to traffic classes, and subport level configuration of pipes and queues changes will be made to macros, data structures and API functions defined in “rte_sched.h”. These changes are aligned to improvements suggested in the RFC https://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2018-November/120035.html.
metrics: The function
rte_metrics_init
will have a non-void return in order to notify errors instead of callingrte_exit
.power:
rte_power_set_env
function will no longer return 0 on attempt to set new power environment if power environment was already initialized. In this case the function will return -1 unless the environment is unset first (usingrte_power_unset_env
). Other function usage scenarios will not change.