Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 0/2] dpdk: Allow for dynamic enablement of some isolated features

[Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 04:57:56PM +0200, Vincent JARDIN wrote:
> On 01/08/2014 16:06, Neil Horman wrote:
> >Thats a multi year effort, and not something I'm prepared to even
> >consider undertaking.
> 
> Sorry: I am not pushing you, it was just an open comment. I do agree that it
> is a multi year effort to get it down into a wide "agreed" community. DPDK
> community cannot manage it.
> 

I understand, but I still don't think it makes sense to do.  The fat elf format
was origionally intended to allow transparent movement bewteen major
architectures.  While it certainly could be used to migrate between a smaller
granularity within the same arch family, it seems like a lousy tradeoff to me,
especially as the fanout for variants increases.  Right now I think there are at
least 4 variants within the dpdk (sse3, sse4.2, avx, and avx512).  Thats a 4x
increase in binary size.  While that might make sense for one highly optimized
application, it doesn't seem like it would make sense as a general purpose
utility, as the disk space / speedup tradeoff is not super great.

Neil