Re: [dpdk-dev] [dpdk-techboard] DPDK ABI/API Stability

[Ray Kinsella <mdr@ashroe.eu>]

On 04/04/2019 14:10, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 02:05:27PM +0100, Ray Kinsella wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 04/04/2019 13:02, Luca Boccassi wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2019-04-04 at 11:54 +0100, Bruce Richardson wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 10:29:19AM +0100, Burakov, Anatoly wrote:
>>>>> On 03-Apr-19 4:42 PM, Ray Kinsella wrote:
>>
> I would be too, with certain exceptions - rte_mbuf for one. Any structures
> that are used by applications cannot be made opaque, as apps do not want to
> pay the cost of having to call a function every time they want to access
> something from one of those structures.

These the layout of these structures really must become sacrosanct.
As Stephen points out, there may be room for a one more change - fool me
once - to future poof the structure but after, that these structure will
become very hard to change.

> 
> Thankfully for us, we have plenty of other structures that we can work on
> in the meantime that can be made private to avoid ABI breaks! :-) I suggest
> we work through those first, allowing us to hone our ABI-break avoidance
> skills.
> 
> /Bruce
>