DPDK 26.03 released

DPDK 26.03 released

[Thomas Monjalon]

A new major release is available:
	https://fast.dpdk.org/rel/dpdk-26.03.tar.xz

It was a very small release cycle:
	699 commits from 102 authors
	1077 files changed, 41087 insertions(+), 20971 deletions(-)

It is not planned to start a maintenance branch for 26.03.
This version is ABI-compatible with 25.11.

Highlights of 26.03:
	- ACL custom memory allocation
	- cryptodev 256-bit NEA/NCA/NIA algorithms
	- OpenSSL AES-XTS and SHAKE algorithms
	- BPF atomic XCHG instruction
	- no more format overflow in libraries
	- no more variable shadowing

More details in the release notes:
	https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/rel_notes/release_26_03.html


There are 25 new contributors (including authors, reviewers and testers).
Welcome to Akshatha S, Aliaksei Belovus, Ashok Kumar Natarajan,
Congjie Zhou, David Zage, Garvit Varshney, Keegan Freyhof, Luigi Rizzo,
Mike Bly, Mohammad Shuab Siddique, Mohand Alrasheed, Rajesh Kumar,
Riley Fletcher, Sandeep Penigalapati, Scott Mitchell, Sergei Iashin,
Song Yoong Siang, Talluri Chaitanyababu, Vee Agarwal, Vinay Govindaiah,
Xavier Guillaume, Yang Xu, Yehor Malikov, Yongfeng Wang,
and Zhanibek Bakin.

Below is the number of commits per employer (with authors count):
	229     Intel (25)
	107     stephen@networkplumber.org (1)
	 88     NVIDIA (13)
	 47     Marvell (10)
	 27     Red Hat (4)
	 23     Huawei (4)
	 21     UNH (3)
	 20     CESNET (1)
	 17     Free (1)
	 15     Microsoft (1)
	 13     Realtek (1)
	 12     Broadcom (5)
	 11     AMD (4)
	 10     ZTE (3)
	 10     NebulaMatrix (1)
	        ...

A big thank to all courageous people who took on the non rewarding task
of reviewing other's job.
Based on Reviewed-by and Acked-by tags, the top non-PMD reviewers are:
	 38     Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
	 19     Marat Khalili <marat.khalili@huawei.com>
	 19     Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>
	 18     Patrick Robb <probb@iol.unh.edu>
	 17     Konstantin Ananyev <konstantin.ananyev@huawei.com>
	 15     Chengwen Feng <fengchengwen@huawei.com>
	 14     Morten Brørup <mb@smartsharesystems.com>
	 11     David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>


The next version will be 26.07 in July.

In the meantime, we'll meet at the DPDK Summit in Stockholm:
	https://www.dpdk.org/event/dpdk-summit-2026/

Thanks everyone