2016-07-20 15:13, Ananyev, Konstantin:

Hi Thomas,

quoted

Hi,

This patch announces an interesting change in the DPDK design.

2016-07-20 16:24, Tomasz Kulasek:

quoted

This is an ABI deprecation notice for DPDK 16.11 in librte_ether about
changes in rte_eth_dev and rte_eth_desc_lim structures.

In 16.11, we plan to introduce rte_eth_tx_prep() function to do
necessary preparations of packet burst to be safely transmitted on
device for desired HW offloads (set/reset checksum field according to
the hardware requirements) and check HW constraints (number of
segments per packet, etc).

While the limitations and requirements may differ for devices, it
requires to extend rte_eth_dev structure with new function pointer
"tx_pkt_prep" which can be implemented in the driver to prepare and
verify packets, in devices specific way, before burst, what should to
prevent application to send malformed packets.

Also new fields will be introduced in rte_eth_desc_lim: nb_seg_max and
nb_mtu_seg_max, providing an information about max segments in TSO and
non TSO packets acceptable by device.

We cannot acknowledge such notice without a prior design discussion.
Please explain why you plan to work on this change and give a draft of the new structures (a RFC patch would be ideal).

I think it is not really a deprecation note, but announce ABI change for rte_ethdev.h structures.

An ABI break requires a deprecation notice. So it is :)

The plan is to implement what was proposed & discussed the following thread:
http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2015-September/023603.html

Please could you summarize it here?