19. ABI and API Deprecation

See the guidelines document for details of the ABI policy. API and ABI deprecation notices are to be posted here.

19.1. 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, or pip3, tool for downloading python packages.

  • network includes: Network structures, definitions and functions will be prefixed by rte_ to resolve conflicts with libc headers. This change will break many DPDK APIs.

  • 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 calling rte_panic.

  • eal: the rte_mem_config struct will be made private to remove it from the externally visible ABI and allow it to be updated in the future.

  • 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

  • vfio: removal of rte_vfio_dma_map and rte_vfio_dma_unmap APIs which have been replaced with rte_dev_dma_map and rte_dev_dma_unmap functions. The due date for the removal targets DPDK 20.02.

  • pci: Several exposed functions are misnamed. The following functions are deprecated starting from v17.11 and are replaced:

    • eal_parse_pci_BDF replaced by rte_pci_addr_parse
    • eal_parse_pci_DomBDF replaced by rte_pci_addr_parse
    • rte_eal_compare_pci_addr replaced by rte_pci_addr_cmp

  • dpaa2: removal of rte_dpaa2_memsegs structure which has been replaced by a pa-va search library.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.

  • kni: remove KNI ethtool support. To clarify, this is not to remove the KNI, but only to remove ethtool support of it that is disabled by default and can be enabled via CONFIG_RTE_KNI_KMOD_ETHTOOL config option. Existing KNI ethtool implementation is only supported by igb & ixgbe drivers, by using a copy of kernel drivers in DPDK. This model cannot be extended to all drivers in DPDK and it is too much effort to maintain kernel modules in DPDK. As a result users won’t be able to use ethtool via igb & ixgbe anymore.

  • cryptodev: New member in rte_cryptodev_config to allow applications to disable features supported by the crypto device. Only the following features would be allowed to be disabled this way,

    • RTE_CRYPTODEV_FF_SYMMETRIC_CRYPTO
    • RTE_CRYPTODEV_FF_ASYMMETRIC_CRYPTO
    • RTE_CRYPTODEV_FF_SECURITY

    Disabling unused features would facilitate efficient usage of HW/SW offload.

    • Member uint64_t ff_disable in rte_cryptodev_config

    The field would be added in v19.08.

  • cryptodev: the uint8_t *data member of key structure in the xforms structure (rte_crypto_cipher_xform, rte_crypto_auth_xform, and rte_crypto_aead_xform) will be changed to const uint8_t *data.

  • 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 calling rte_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 (using rte_power_unset_env). Other function usage scenarios will not change.