On 6/13/2016 11:21 AM, Thomas Monjalon wrote:

2016-06-13 11:04, Ferruh Yigit:

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On 6/13/2016 10:29 AM, Thomas Monjalon wrote:

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2016-06-10 19:32, Ferruh Yigit:

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As stated in the comment:
    Order is important: from higher level to lower level

This is an attempt to make the layering order better respected.

Limit scope of --whole-archive to pmd libraries

Compared to the link order in the v2, you did two things:
1/ move PMDs to the first position
2/ restrict --whole-archive to PMDs only

Having the PMDs first, helps the linker to get all the PMD dependencies
in the static binary. Thus it seems we do not need --whole-archive
for the PMD dependencies (ethdev, mbuf, etc).
But, if an external PMD is loaded via dlopen, it is possible that it
needs a symbol which was not used by the internal PMDs. So it will not
be found in the statically linked binary.
Let's take another example: if we disable the internal PMDs with their
config options from the static build, and we decide to build them
separately as DSOs. We won't be able to load them as plugins because
they depend on symbols which won't be found in the static binary.

So you want to keep all objects in final binary (used or unused) because
of the possibility that any plugin may use them.

Yes

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But what is the list to include here, whole dpdk?, -since we may not
know what API will plugin call.

The list of the libraries candidates to be called from a driver can be
discussed. The top layers like lpm or distributor should not be in this
list I think.

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What I am confused is --whole-archive only used when dpdk compiled as
static, if dpdk compiled as shared, each PMD should have proper
dependencies [1], and if external PMD compiled properly there shouldn't
be a problem. So do we have a case that dpdk compiled statically into
final binary but we still want to load some plugins dynamically?

Yes a plugin can be loaded from a static binary.
Breaking this feature would need a separate discussion and notices.

Thanks for clarifying, I wasn't aware of this.
So I am leaving this patch, please just ping if anything required from me.

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To make it short, the PMDs must be considered as plugins. Therefore, we
must not rely on their availability to link the required symbols in
a static binary.
To make sure the plugin loading will be always well achieved, we must
link the static PMDs at the last position.

I think this is not the issue of linking PMD's first or last, but
expanding --whole-archive to cover other libraries other than PMDs.

Yes, linking PMD at the end is a way to force us to keep some libraries
in --whole-archive.

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If you agree, I vote for the v2 of this patchset.

If this is breaking something and best way to fix is not in external PMD
but in here, please feel free to go with v2.

I don't see any other solution.
But I'm sure we could discuss it more and/or improve it in the future.