[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v7 06/10] mbuf_offload: library to support attaching offloads to a mbuf

[Thomas Monjalon]

2015-11-23 14:08, Olivier MATZ:
> 2015-11-23 12:16, Declan Doherty:
> > 2015-11-23 11:52, Ananyev, Konstantin:
> >> I understand that current API is probably not perfect and might need
> >> to be revised in future.
> 
> The problem is that it's not easy to change the dpdk API now.
[...]
> > Just to re-iterate Konstantin's point above. I'm aware that a number of
> > mbuf operations currently are not supported and are not aware of the
> > rte_mbuf_offload, but we will be continuing development throughout 2.3
> > and beyond to address this. Also I hope we will get much more community
> > feedback and interaction so we can get a more definite feature set for
> > the library, and  by minimizing the features in this release, it will
> > allow more flexibility on how we can develop this part of handling
> > offloaded operations and it will limit the ABI issues we will face if it
> > turns out we need to change this going forwards.
> 
> I can see the amount of work you've done for making the cryptodev
> happen in dpdk. I also recognize that I didn't make comments very early.
> 
> If we really want to have this feature in the next release, maybe there
> is a way to mark it as experimental, meaning that the API is subject to
> change? What do you think?
> 
> Thomas, any comment?

Yes, it is a totally new work and it probably needs more time to have a
design working well for most of use cases.
As I already discussed with Olivier, I think it should be considered as
experimental. It means we can try it but do not consider it as a stable
API. So the deprecation process would not apply until the experimental
flag is removed.

For the release 2.2, it would be better to remove the crypto dependency
in mbuf. Do you think it is possible?