doc: add pf-ring plugin upgrade notes

Ticket: #7162

diff --git a/doc/userguide/upgrade.rst b/doc/userguide/upgrade.rst
index 3748c1f40370e774d5a7d6e9288ff0b9fbf2bc4e..4aadb978e17ae670c0e69f1bf223b56aa38844d0 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/userguide/upgrade.rst
+++ b/doc/userguide/upgrade.rst
@@ -68,6 +68,8 @@ Major changes
 - DNS logging has been modified to be more consistent across requests,
   responses and alerts. See :doc:`DNS Logging Changes for 8.0
   <upgrade/8.0-dns-logging-changes>`.
+- PF_RING support has been moved to a plugin. See :doc:`PF_RING plugin
+  <upgrade/8.0-pfring-plugin>`.
 
 Upgrading 6.0 to 7.0
 --------------------

diff --git a/doc/userguide/upgrade/8.0-pfring-plugin.rst b/doc/userguide/upgrade/8.0-pfring-plugin.rst
new file mode 100644 (file)
index 0000000..10632ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/userguide/upgrade/8.0-pfring-plugin.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+:orphan: Document only referenced from upgrade.rst
+
+PF_RING as a Plugin
+===================
+
+Suricata 8.0 moves PF_RING support to a dynamically loaded plugin. For
+convenience, this plugin is still bundled with Suricata, but it may be
+removed from the Suricata source tree into its own repository in a
+future release.
+
+Upgrading
+---------
+
+Suricata 8.0 continues to respect the ``--enable-pfring`` compile time
+option, as well as the ``--pfring*`` command line options, and also
+the ``pfring`` section of the configuration file.
+
+.. note:: When the PF_RING plugin is eventually removed from the
+          Suricata source tree these options may be removed and/or
+          changed as this would allow the PF_RING plugin to have its
+          own release cycle and make changes independent of Suricata.
+
+However, the ``pfring`` plugin must be loaded before it can be
+used. If doing a fresh build of Suricata with PF_RING support, the
+``suricata.yaml`` configuration file should be configured to load the
+plugin already, for example::
+
+  plugins:
+    - /usr/lib/suricata/pfring.so
+
+If you are upgrading, you will need to add the location of
+``pfring.so`` to the ``plugins`` section of your ``suricata.yaml``
+manually.
+
+Then your existing PF_RING command line options and configuration
+should continue to work.
+
+Caveats
+-------
+
+Currently builing the PF_RING plugin is not compatible with the
+``--disable-shared`` configure argument.
+