I think it would be good to rebase and send at the beginning of the 19.11 cycle.
Thank you
13/06/2019 16:23, Neil Horman:
> Hey-
> Based on our recent conversations regarding the use of symbols only
> meant for internal dpdk consumption (between dpdk libraries), this is an idea
> that I've come up with that I'd like to get some feedback on
>
> Summary:
> 1) We have symbols in the DPDK that are meant to be used between DPDK
> libraries,
> but not by applications linking to them
> 2) We would like to document those symbols in the code, so as to note them
> clearly as for being meant for internal use only
> 3) Linker symbol visibility is a very coarse grained tool, and so there is no
> good way in a single library to mark items as being meant for use only by
> other
> DPDK libraries, at least not without some extensive runtime checking
>
>
> Proposal:
> I'm proposing that we introduce the __rte_internal tag. From a coding
> standpoint it works a great deal like the __rte_experimental tag in that it
> expempts the tagged symbol from ABI constraints (as the only users should be
> represented in the DPDK build environment). Additionally, the __rte_internal
> macro resolves differently based on the definition of the BUILDING_RTE_SDK
> flag
> (working under the assumption that said flag should only ever be set if we are
> actually building DPDK libraries which will make use of internal calls). If
> the
> BUILDING_RTE_SDK flag is set __rte_internal resolves to __attribute__((section
> "text.internal)), placing it in a special text section which is then used to
> validate that the the symbol appears in the INTERNAL section of the
> corresponding library version map). If BUILDING_RTE_SDK is not set, then
> __rte_internal resolves to __attribute__((error("..."))), which causes any
> caller of the tagged function to throw an error at compile time, indicating
> that
> the symbol is not available for external use.
>
> This isn't a perfect solution, as applications can still hack around it of
> course, but I think it hits some of the high points, restricting symbol access
> for any library that prototypes its public and private symbols in the same
> header file, excluding the internal symbols from ABI constraints, and clearly
> documenting those symbols which we wish to limit to internal usage.
