-Deprecation
-===========
+ABI and API Deprecation
+=======================
-See the :doc:`guidelines document for details of the ABI policy </guidelines/versioning>`.
+See the :doc:`guidelines document for details of the ABI policy </contributing/versioning>`.
API and ABI deprecation notices are to be posted here.
-Help to update from a previous release is provided in
-:doc:`another section </rel_notes/updating_apps>`.
-
Deprecation Notices
-------------------
-* Significant ABI changes are planned for struct rte_eth_dev to support up to
- 1024 queues per port. This change will be in release 2.2.
- There is no backward compatibility planned from release 2.2.
- All binaries will need to be rebuilt from release 2.2.
-
-* The EAL function rte_eal_pci_close_one is deprecated because renamed to
- rte_eal_pci_detach.
-
-* The Macros RTE_HASH_BUCKET_ENTRIES_MAX and RTE_HASH_KEY_LENGTH_MAX are
- deprecated and will be removed with version 2.2.
-
-* Significant ABI changes are planned for struct rte_mbuf, struct rte_kni_mbuf,
- and several ``PKT_RX_`` flags will be removed, to support unified packet type
- from release 2.1. Those changes may be enabled in the upcoming release 2.1
- with CONFIG_RTE_NEXT_ABI.
-
-* librte_malloc library has been integrated into librte_eal. The 2.1 release
- creates a dummy/empty malloc library to fulfill binaries with dynamic linking
- dependencies on librte_malloc.so. Such dummy library will not be created from
- release 2.2 so binaries will need to be rebuilt.
-
-* The following fields have been deprecated in rte_eth_stats:
- imissed, ibadcrc, ibadlen, imcasts, fdirmatch, fdirmiss,
- tx_pause_xon, rx_pause_xon, tx_pause_xoff, rx_pause_xoff
+* The ethdev hotplug API is going to be moved to EAL with a notification
+ mechanism added to crypto and ethdev libraries so that hotplug is now
+ available to both of them. This API will be stripped of the device arguments
+ so that it only cares about hotplugging.
+
+* Structures embodying pci and vdev devices are going to be reworked to
+ integrate new common rte_device / rte_driver objects (see
+ http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2016-January/031390.html).
+ ethdev and crypto libraries will then only handle those objects so that they
+ do not need to care about the kind of devices that are being used, making it
+ easier to add new buses later.
+
+* ABI changes are planned for struct rte_pci_id, i.e., add new field ``class``.
+ This new added ``class`` field can be used to probe pci device by class
+ related info. This change should impact size of struct rte_pci_id and struct
+ rte_pci_device. The release 16.04 does not contain these ABI changes, but
+ release 16.07 will.
+
+* The xstats API and rte_eth_xstats struct will be changed to allow retrieval
+ of values without any string copies or parsing.
+ No backwards compatibility is planned, as it would require code duplication
+ in every PMD that supports xstats.
+
+* ABI changes are planned for adding four new flow types. This impacts
+ RTE_ETH_FLOW_MAX. The release 2.2 does not contain these ABI changes,
+ but release 2.3 will. [postponed]
+
+* ABI will change for rte_mempool struct to move the cache-related fields
+ to the more appropriate rte_mempool_cache struct. The mempool API is
+ also changed to enable external cache management that is not tied to EAL
+ threads. Some mempool get and put calls are removed in favor of a more
+ compact API. The ones that remain are backwards compatible and use the
+ per-lcore default cache if available. This change targets release 16.07.
+
+* The rte_mempool struct will be changed in 16.07 to facilitate the new
+ external mempool manager functionality.
+ The ring element will be replaced with a more generic 'pool' opaque pointer
+ to allow new mempool handlers to use their own user-defined mempool
+ layout. Also newly added to rte_mempool is a handler index.
+ The existing API will be backward compatible, but there will be new API
+ functions added to facilitate the creation of mempools using an external
+ handler. The 16.07 release will contain these changes.
+
+* A librte_vhost public structures refactor is planned for DPDK 16.07
+ that requires both ABI and API change.
+ The proposed refactor would expose DPDK vhost dev to applications as
+ a handle, like the way kernel exposes an fd to user for locating a
+ specific file, and to keep all major structures internally, so that
+ we are likely to be free from ABI violations in future.