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, or pip3, 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 calling rte_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  • dpaa2: removal of rte_dpaa2_memsegs structure which has been replaced by a pa-va search library.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as well as filter types MACVLAN, ETHERTYPE, FLEXIBLE, SYN, NTUPLE, TUNNEL, FDIR, HASH and L2_TUNNEL, is superseded by the generic flow API (rte_flow) in PMDs that implement the latter.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 return int 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: Will add RTE_ETH_ prefix to all ethdev macros/enums in v21.11. Macros will be added for backward compatibility. Backward compatibility macros will be removed on v22.11. A few old backward compatibility macros from 2013 that does not have proper prefix will be removed on v21.11.
  • 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 updating rte_mbuf::hash::fdir. This scheme will allow PMDs to avoid writes to rte_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.
  • 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.