[dpdk-announce] release candidate 18.0-rc1

[Thomas Monjalon]

A new DPDK release candidate is ready for testing:
	https://git.dpdk.org/dpdk/tag/?id=v18.08-rc1

It is the first milestone of a short release after the huge 18.05.
The number of commits is small (570) and there is no specific feature
to highlight, except a big work on vhost/virtio (in-order, packed ring, etc),
a rework of softnic PMD, and some work on memory allocation.

The release notes so far:
	http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/rel_notes/release_18_08.html
Please think about updating the release notes when you add a feature.

Some features are expected in 18.08-rc2:
	- tap support in secondary process
	- 3DES support in AESNI_MB PMD
	- new compress drivers
	- noisy VNF forward mode in testpmd

Some planned features are postponed to 18.11:
	- new devargs syntax
	- failure handler for PCIE hardware hotplug
	- virtual device hotplug
	- add MPLS to rte_flow encapsulation API
	- add metadata matching in rte_flow API
	- libedit integration
	- clean-up of panic calls

Please be aware that there are some API changes in 18.08:
	http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/rel_notes/release_18_08.html#api-changes
	* and the old ethdev offload API has been removed

18.08-rc2 is expected during next week (around 25th of July).
The 18.08 release should happen in early days of August.
Hopefully we are not creating too much bugs in this short cycle.
When finding a new bug, please report it on bugzilla:
        http://dpdk.org/tracker/

Thank you everyone