RE: Clarification on Minimum Supported Kernel Version for DPDK

["Morten Brørup" <mb@smartsharesystems.com>]

@Kevin, @Stephen, @Bruce,

I cannot reliably answer Cody's question, and it may need further discussion.

What is your opinion on minimum Linux kernel version requirements?

@Thomas: In the future, the DPDK release notes should mention the minimum Linux kernel requirements.

> From: Cody Cheng [mailto:ccheng@iol.unh.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, 20 March 2025 21.28
> 
> Hi Morten,
> 
> I am in the process of setting up a test environment at the UNH DPDK
> Community Test Lab that follows the minimum supported kernel version
> for DPDK. According to the DPDK documentation, the minimum supported
> kernel version is 4.19. However, the oldest long term stable kernel
> version listed on kernel.org is 5.4.291.
> 
> Should the test environment be set up on kernel version 4.19 or
> 5.4.291?

The kernel 4.19 support stems from still supporting RHEL/CentOS 7.
I wonder if this exception mentioned in the documentation [1] is still valid, or if we should bump it to RHEL/CentOS 8, which ships with kernel 4.18 [1].

RHEL/CentOS 7 support was discussed at by tech board long ago [2], but I cannot find a conclusion about the kernel version; the discussion was mostly about compiler support.

[1]: https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/linux_gsg/sys_reqs.html#system-software
[2]: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/8.0_release_notes/index#overview
[3]: https://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2023-February/263516.html


> 
> Thanks,
> Cody Cheng
> UNH DPDK Community Test Lab