DPDK finally has established a stable release process. The first update out of this is the 16.07.2 release which this shall make available on Yakkety. It feels appropriate to provide that as an MRE update since it contains a number of critical bug-fixes. Given the somewhat bleeding edge state DPDK seems to be in this will help to stabilize a lot.
Upstream branch of this stable release is at http://dpdk.org/browse/dpdk-stable/
The summary "changelog" of the stable release(s) is at http://dpdk.org/doc/guides-16.07/rel_notes/release_16_07.html#fixes-in-stable-release
I'd consider this well tested to be suitable for an MRE release by Upstream:
- upstream integrated Autotest suite
- Upstream has a CI Lab driven by Intel running on RC&Releases (Link FYI https://dpdksummit.com/Archive/pdf/2016Userspace/Day02-Session10-QianXu-Userspace2016.pdf)
- the purpose of the (rather new) stable branch is to provide an API/ABI stable set of fixes to downstreams
- These tests run on commit (verification) and larger tests on RC/Releases
In addition I on the packaged-in-Ubuntu side we have:
- autopkgtests, but due to the nature of DPDK those can only really test the runtime bits (like service invocation)
- a testing project at https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-server/ubuntu/+source/dpdk-testing/+git/dpdk-testing which I ran against new uploads as a gating check
- this runs the package autotests (in a manner knowing about the remaining false positives)
- this also runs some of the bundled examples l2fwd, testpmd and finally the only "in archive
exploiter" we have so far in OpenvSwitch-DPDK (functional and performance checks)
I'll attach the log of the testing once it completes against a ppa with the proposed changes, but wanted to start the MRE discussion/process already.
FYI - the zesty upload (which contained way more changes out of the deb_dpdk packaging on top) failed autopkgtest due to a ppc64el dependency.
That came from the test being valid if ppc64el is enabled, which it will be in this cycle, but it is not yet. I already uploaded a fix to the test, but that slightly postpones the upload of this MRE which as usual SRUs do depends on the devel release having the same bits and prove to be working there.