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5.4. Compile DPDK Applications
Currently there are not a lot consumers of the DPDK library that are stable and released. OpenVswitch-DPDK being an exception to that (see below), but in general it is very likely that you might want / have to compile an app against the library.
You will often find guides that tell you to fetch the DPDK sources, build them to your needs and eventually build your application based on DPDK by setting values RTE_* for the build system. Since Ubunutu provides an already compiled DPDK for you can can skip all that. To simplify setting the proper variables you can source the file /usr/share/dpdk/dpdk-sdk-env.sh before building your application. Here an excerpt building the l2fwd example application delivered with the dpdk-doc package.
sudo apt-get install dpdk-dev libdpdk-dev
. /usr/share/dpdk/dpdk-sdk-env.sh
make -C /usr/share/dpdk/examples/l2fwd
Depending on what you build it might be a good addition to install all of DPDK build dependencies before the make.
sudo apt-get install build-dep dpdk