Comment 11 for bug 1539775

Hi Pradeep and Breno,
since you refer to MLNX_OFED I assume that implies you will need the mlx4/5 pmd drivers in DPDK.
Those drivers are disabled by default in DPDK which usually implies they are not considered is not stable to be used. In this case they are disabled due to external dependencies. But never the less that implies they get less exposure to testing and discussions, not to speak about the potential version mismatches that often occur with mlx based drivers.

Also DPDK for power can only build for power8 and I'm not sure if that gets us into trouble. I asked around and got confirmations that recent userspace is on >=power8 anyway. So at least that won't be an issue then.

As I promised I started to prepare something for you in a ppa that you can test to verify - as this will be the first step to think about going on with a feature freeze exception in case you really want to push for inclusion into yakkety.
To do so, I have:
- enabled dpdk for ppc64el
- added power arch dependent custom target and conf
- enabled mlx
- added dependencies for mlx
- enabled autopkgtests for ppc64el

Almost as I expected that fails to build for the MLX drivers. And given that http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=209&mtag=pmd_for_dpdk refers to only DPDK 2.2 and not 16.07.
I explicitly checked - that also applies to power, see https://launchpadlibrarian.net/281700914/buildlog_ubuntu-yakkety-ppc64el.dpdk_16.07-0ubuntu3~dev02_BUILDING.txt.gz
These issues are known http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2015-November/027781.html
But I can't really think of providing a in-archive package build against out-of archive Mellanix OFED libs on that short term. Maybe there is a way, but for now that means mlx drivers stay disabled.

But with those disabled ppc64el has issues. It FTBFS as-is where amd64, i386 and arm64 just work.
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/281703816/buildlog_ubuntu-yakkety-ppc64el.dpdk_16.07-0ubuntu3~dev03_BUILDING.txt.gz

The ppa (would be) at: https://launchpad.net/~paelzer/+archive/ubuntu/deb-dpdk-16.07
For now only with associated build issues and log there.
The git branch where I have done that is at: https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-server/dpdk/+git/dpdk/+ref/enablepowerpc

Please feel free to take a look at the branch yourself if you like to give it an extra try, just as we worked together in the past.

I've not yet given up considering to enable it, but given the state as reported that certainly is worth a bit of a discussion and a lot more work.
If you want tech preview only anyway, how about keeping it a ppa for 16.10 - that gives you time to identify and fixup the arch specific issues?

Mid Term - I encourage you work with me early on to get it into https://wiki.fd.io/view/Deb_dpdk - from there it will naturally migrate into 17.04 later on.