Roadmap

Version 19.05 (2019 May)

• initial support for DPDK on Windows
• new device specification (devargs) syntax
• documentation for device management
• DMA mapping API for external memory
• relaxed memory ordering in spinlock and rwlock
• ticket-lock
• RCU library
• lock-free extended bucket in hash library
• TCP SEQ and ACK offload with rte_flow API and mlx5 implementation
• ICMP ping offload with rte_flow API and mlx5 implementation
• new mlx5 steering flow engine for high (millions/sec) insertion rate
• mlx5 out of the box performance improvements
• mlx5/mlx4 robustness improvement for Rx/Tx errors
• failsafe support in multi-process
• AF_XDP PMD
• baseband device turbo PMD
• QAT compression PMD support for large scatter-gather lists
• QAT asymmetric crypto with support for modexp and modinv
• additional crypto/auth algorithms in the IPsec library

Version 19.08 (2019 August)

Version 19.11 (2019 September)

Nice to have - Future

• multi-process rework
• automatic UIO/VFIO binding
• infiniband driver class (ibdev)
• default configuration from files
• generic white/blacklisting
• libedit integration

Cycle model

A typical release should be done after 3 months.

It is designed to allow DPDK to keep evolving at a rapid pace while giving enough opportunity to review, discuss and improve the contributions.

The merge window will open once the previous release is complete. First version of a new feature must be submitted before the proposal deadline. Features that miss this first period will be deferred until the next release.

Updated versions of patches (v2, v3, etc.) will be submitted to address comments. The new features must be properly reviewed, tested and accepted before the integration deadline. Otherwise, they will be postponed to the next releases.

At the end of the merge window, the first release candidate is out.

The last period is 1 month long and is dedicated to bug fixing.

Scheduling

19.05

• Proposal deadline: March 1, 2019
• Integration deadline: March 29, 2019
• Release: May 10, 2019

19.08

• Release: August 2, 2019

19.11

• Release: November 8, 2019

Stable Releases

There is a documentation page describing the guidelines of the stable releases.

Stable point releases follow mainline releases.

After each -rc tag and after the final version, relevant bug fixes get backported by the stable maintainers into the respective branches in “bursts”.

Developers can provide stable-specific patches by sending them to stable@dpdk.org only (avoiding dev@dpdk.org).

After all the relevant bugfixes have been backported, regression tests are run, and if clear, the stable release is announced.

Typically a new stable release version follows a mainline release by 1-2 weeks, depending on the test results.