Comment 0 for bug 1784816

17.11.3-3 was made available in Cosmic now we should SRU the stable fixes to our latest LTS as well.

This bug tracks an update for the DPDK packages, version 17.11.3.

This update includes bugfixes only following the SRU policy exception defined at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/DPDK.

There is one exception to that in this upload which is after working with Mellanox on verification we will enable MLX based PMDs following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Other_safe_cases for HW exploitation (these extra PMDs do not change existing PMDs/Libs - think of it as a few extra device drivers.

[Impact]

Stable release update so not directly applicable; see the exception policy document.

[Major Changes]

Major Changes:
- from upstream: none but bugfixes
- from us: now enabling MLX4/5 PMds
=> The full release notes can be found at: https://doc.dpdk.org/guides-17.11/rel_notes/release_17_11.html#id3

[Test Plan]

See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/DPDK#SRU_TestVerify
TODO: attach a log of executing said tests from a ppa with the upload
TODO: if there are any non passing tests - explain why that is ok in this case.

[Regression Potential]

Upstream performs extensive testing before release, giving us a high degree of confidence in the general case. There problems are most likely to manifest in Ubuntu-specific integrations, such as in relation to the versions of dependencies available and other packaging-specific matters.

An extra risk might be due to the new drivers, but as I mentioned they do not affect the existing ones. There could be a minor impact due to dependencies - the new binary packages for MLX depend on ibverbs and such from rdma-core. The development libs libdpdk-dev&dpdk-dev depends on all libs+pmds as usual for such a lib. There could be a case where one wanted to use external MLNX-OFED - part of the procedure to install that is to remove and mask the "from Archive" libibverbs and such. Due to that with the upgrade libdpdk-dev/dpdk-dev would no more be installable (unless nodeps is used). But since this only hit non-Archive-cases it is already unsupported anyway - never the less I wanted to mention it for completeness.