[RFC PATCH 00/44] Allow intitializing EAL without argc/argv

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:57:52 +0100
Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson at intel.com> wrote:

> Part 3: Prototype of an eal_cfg library
> 
> Once we have the internal C API to init eal using a struct
> rte_eal_user_cfg, we can create new libraries which provide alternate
> ways to build up the user_cfg and initialize DPDK. Patches 37-44 have a
> rough example of such a library.
> 
> - The lib allows a user to create an opaque rte_eal_user_cfg struct,
>   which can then be modified by APIs to get/set various parameters
>   before calling rte_cfg_eal_init().
> - An alternative way to do things (not prototyped), may be to have a
>   library that creates an eal_user_cfg struct based on the contents of
>   an ini file using the configfile library.
> [Both these options could be used in parallel. Note too that both have
> no ABI implications for adding new flags, or making old ones no-ops!]


Ideally cfg would be ini file.
But the existing ini file parser has lots of issues and is really
not that usable. Compared to other equivalent non-DPDK libraries.