Currently the DPDK Environment Abstraction Layer has its guts on the floor ;-) The data structure for lcore config is a holey mess and changing it would break the ABI.
I propose that for 19.05 we introduce accessor functions and change all internal (out side of eal directory) to use those. And add a deprecation notice. For 19.08, we can mark the data structure as deprecated but keep it the same. Any thing built from source that hits the global variable will get a warning. Binaries will still run unmodified. For 19.11, lcore_config can be moved to eal_private.h where it belongs, and some simple rearrangements will shrink it and get almost all data on the same cache line. This breaks ABI but API stays the same as 19.05 After that some of the debris can be cleaned out without affecting API or ABI in future.
