[dpdk-dev] [PATCH 1/1] eal: Don't fail secondary if primary is missing tailqs

[Burdick, Cliff]

-----Original Message-----
From: Burakov, Anatoly [mailto:anatoly.burakov at intel.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 1:39 AM
To: Thomas Monjalon; Burdick, Cliff
Cc: dev at dpdk.org
Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 1/1] eal: Don't fail secondary if primary is missing tailqs

On 13-Nov-18 9:21 AM, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> 13/11/2018 00:33, Burdick, Cliff:
>> This patch was submitted by Jean Tourrilhes over two years ago, but didn't receive any responses. I hit the same issue recently when trying to use cgo (Golang) as a primary process linked to libdpdk.a against a C++ application linked against the same library.
> 
> The question is to know why you don't have the same constructors in primary and seconday?
> 

> I've hit similar things in the past. I believe it was caused by our build system stripping out unused libraries (such as rte_hash) from the binary and thus not calling the constructor in the primary, but doing so in the secondary (or something to that effect).
> In any case, this is caused by linking different number of libraries to primary and secondary, and should probably be fixed in the build system, not in the tailqs code (unless we specifically support having different linked libraries to primary and secondary?).

Right, I think the original author of the patch stated the reasons in the link I provided. The build system seems like the most appropriate place to fix it, but the patch got me going quickly. I think the question is whether you want DPDK to support these other ways of linking. I'm certainly not the first to use cgo, since there's a virtual switch project doing the same:

https://github.com/lagopus/vsw

They don't use primary/secondary processes, though, so the issue is never hit. I'm in a situation where using cgo seemed like the easiest path to accomplish what I'm doing since I needed specialized libraries for it that were not available in C/C++. At some point I bet someone would use Cython to start linking against DPDK as well, and we'd likely run into the same issue.