DPDK's Poll Mode Drivers ignore field rss_key_len of struct rte_eth_rss_conf. For example, dependencies/dpdk/drivers/net/ixgbe/ixgbe_rxtx.c:ixgbe_dev_rss_hash_conf_get() does not even mention the field rss_key_len. These bugs should be fixed upstream.
Gatekeeper works around this bug in DPDK by calling rte_eth_dev_info_get() to obtain the length of the RSS hash key.