Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH v7 2/9] eal: introduce RTE common initialization level

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>]

21/07/2020 13:29, David Marchand:
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 1:19 PM Parav Pandit <parav@mellanox.com> wrote:
> > Basically mlx5_pci_bus, mlx5_net and mlx5_vdpa will be called with same
> > priority RTE_PRIO_LAST.
> > driver id table and drv_flags dynamically updated as PMDs register.
> >
> > Should we have another API after rte_pci_register() to indicate that
> > some field of the driver are updated, instead of just silently updating
> > it in a PMD?
> 
> All of this happens in constructor context, this is a really early
> stage used to resolve code dependencies.
> No big init should happen there.

In general, there is a misunderstanding of what should be done
in a constructor. I think we should document constructor usage properly.

For the record, init done in constructors should be small.
If the application is linked with DPDK but choose to not initialize it,
it should not have driver initialized (until it calls rte_eal_init).
Constructor init should be limited to adding a driver struct to a list.