At the same time, the major ABI version is changed atomically across all
libraries by incrementing the major version in the ABI_VERSION file. This is
-done globally for all libraries that declare a stable ABI. For libraries marked
-as EXPERIMENTAL, their major ABI version is always set to 0.
+done globally for all libraries.
Minor ABI versions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* ``VERSION_SYMBOL_EXPERIMENTAL(b, e)``: Creates a symbol version table entry
binding versioned symbol ``b@EXPERIMENTAL`` to the internal function ``be``.
The macro is used when a symbol matures to become part of the stable ABI, to
- provide an alias to experimental for some time.
+ provide an alias to experimental until the next major ABI version.
.. _example_abi_macro_usage:
In situations in which an ``experimental`` symbol has been stable for some time,
and it becomes a candidate for promotion to the stable ABI. At this time, when
-promoting the symbol, maintainer may choose to provide an alias to the
+promoting the symbol, the maintainer may choose to provide an alias to the
``experimental`` symbol version, so as not to break consuming applications.
+This alias is then dropped in the next major ABI version.
The process to provide an alias to ``experimental`` is similar to that, of
:ref:`symbol versioning <example_abi_macro_usage>` described above.
-------------------------
The ``devtools`` directory in the DPDK source tree contains a utility program,
-``validate-abi.sh``, for validating the DPDK ABI based on the Linux `ABI
-Compliance Checker
-<http://ispras.linuxbase.org/index.php/ABI_compliance_checker>`_.
+``check-abi.sh``, for validating the DPDK ABI based on the libabigail
+`abidiff utility <https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/abidiff.html>`_.
-This has a dependency on the ``abi-compliance-checker`` and ``and abi-dumper``
-utilities which can be installed via a package manager. For example::
+The syntax of the ``check-abi.sh`` utility is::
- sudo yum install abi-compliance-checker
- sudo yum install abi-dumper
+ devtools/check-abi.sh <refdir> <newdir>
-The syntax of the ``validate-abi.sh`` utility is::
+Where <refdir> specifies the directory housing the reference build of DPDK,
+and <newdir> specifies the DPDK build directory to check the ABI of.
- ./devtools/validate-abi.sh <REV1> <REV2>
-
-Where ``REV1`` and ``REV2`` are valid gitrevisions(7)
-https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gitrevisions.html
-on the local repo.
-
-For example::
-
- # Check between the previous and latest commit:
- ./devtools/validate-abi.sh HEAD~1 HEAD
-
- # Check on a specific compilation target:
- ./devtools/validate-abi.sh -t x86_64-native-linux-gcc HEAD~1 HEAD
-
- # Check between two tags:
- ./devtools/validate-abi.sh v2.0.0 v2.1.0
-
- # Check between git master and local topic-branch "vhost-hacking":
- ./devtools/validate-abi.sh master vhost-hacking
-
-After the validation script completes (it can take a while since it need to
-compile both tags) it will create compatibility reports in the
-``./abi-check/compat_report`` directory. Listed incompatibilities can be found
-as follows::
-
- grep -lr Incompatible abi-check/compat_reports/
+The ABI compatibility is automatically verified when using a build script
+from ``devtools``, if the variable ``DPDK_ABI_REF_VERSION`` is set with a tag,
+as described in :ref:`ABI check recommendations<integrated_abi_check>`.