[dpdk-dev] Why IVSHMEM was removed since 16.11 ?

[Burakov, Anatoly]

> From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of Furong
> Sent: Tuesday, August 8, 2017 8:26 AM
> To: dev at dpdk.org
> Subject: [dpdk-dev] Why IVSHMEM was removed since 16.11 ?
> 
> The release notes of dpdk-16.11 had shown that IVSHMEM was removed
> due to some design issues.
> 
> So, what are these issues?
> 
> Thanks!
> 

Hi Furong,

There were multiple issues involved. Biggest of all, it required a patch to QEMU that wasn't maintained and wasn't upstream (i.e. vanilla QEMU didn't work with DPDK's implementation of IVSHMEM support). Second, it was basically hacked in to EAL in order to support what it does [1], and the engineering effort to fix all of that isn't worth the benefit it would provide, as no one appeared to be using it heavily enough to object to its deprecation.

Hope this clears things up.

[1] http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2016-June/040844.html

Thanks,
Anatoly