Community CI Meeting Minutes - April 4, 2024

[Patrick Robb <probb@iol.unh.edu>]

April 4, 2024

#####################################################################
Attendees
1. Patrick Robb
2. Juraj Linkeš
3. Paul Szczepanek
4. Luca Vizzarro

#####################################################################
Minutes

=====================================================================
General Announcements
* DPDK 24.03 has been released
* UNH Community Lab is experiencing power outages, and we are shutting
down testing for the day after this meeting.
   * Will put in retests once we’re back up and running
* Daylight saving time has hit North America, and will also happen in
Europe between this meeting and the next one. Should we adjust?
   * We will adjust earlier 1 hour
* Server Refresh:
   * GB will vote on this soon (I think over email)
   * Patrick sent Nathan some new information about the ARM Grace
server that ARM is requesting, which Nathan is passing along to GB
* UNH lab is working on updates to get_reruns.py for retests v2, and
will upstream this when ready.
   * UNH will also start pre-populating all environments with PENDING,
and then overwriting those as new results come in.
   * Reminder - Final conclusion on policy is:
      * A) If retest is requested without rebase key, then retest
"original" dpdk artifact (either by re-using the existing tarball (unh
lab) or tracking the commit from submit time and re-applying onto dpdk
at that commit (loongson)).
      * B) If rebase key is included, apply to tip of the indicated
branch. If, because the branch has changed, the patch no longer
applies, then we can report an apply failure. Then, submitter has to
refactor their patch and resubmit.
      * In either case, report the new results with an updated test
result in the email (i.e. report "_Testing PASS RETEST #1" instead of
"_Testing PASS" in the email body).
* Depends-on support: Patrick pinged Thomas about this this morning.
   * https://github.com/getpatchwork/patchwork/issues/583 and
https://github.com/getpatchwork/git-pw/issues/71
* MSVC: Tech board discussed extending the dpdk libraries which
compile with MSVC in CI testing, and making all new libraries which
will be used by Windows require compile using MSVC
   * Some members mentioned difficulty due to burden of running
Windows VM to test their patches against before CI
      * One solution is GitHub actions
      * Honnappa requested lab host a windows VM as a community
resource. Users could SSH onto the lab VPN, and use that machine.
         * Patrick Robbwill follow up on the mailing list to see
whether the ci group approves of this idea.
* DPDK Summit will most likely be in Montreal
   * Once we have a date, Patrick will suggest to GB and TB that
anyone who is interested can visit the lab the date after
   * CFP:
      * Should probably give a DTS update, which can be from Patrick,
other UNH people, Honnappa, maybe Juraj (remotely)
      * UNH folks can probably do a CI testing update
         * Discuss new hardware
         * Discuss new testing
         * Discuss new reporting functionality, retests, depends-on,
other qol stuff

=====================================================================
CI Status

---------------------------------------------------------------------
UNH-IOL Community Lab
* Dodji Seketeli is requesting information about the Community Lab’s
ABI jobs to investigate an error on his patch
   * Libabigail version is 2.2.0
   * Patrick will send him the .so abi ref dirs this morning.
* Marvell CN10K:
   * TG is working, Octeon DUT can run DPDK apps and forward packets.
   * Can’t figure out how to reconfigure the link speed on the QSFP
port (want 2x100GbE not 4x 50GbE) - will ask Marvell people to SSH on
to set this
   * Also need to verify the correct meson options for native builds on the DUT
      * right now just using “meson setup -Dplatform=cn10k build” from dpdk docs
      * Juraj states that for ARM cpus (which is on this board) you
should be able to natively compile with default options
* SPDK: Working on these compile jobs
   * Currently compile with:
      * Ubuntu 22.04
      * Debian 11
      * Debian 12
      * CentOS 8
      * CentOS 9
      * Fedora 37
      * Fedora 38
      * Fedora 39
      * Opensuse-Leap 15 but with a warning
   * Cannot compile with:
      * Rhel 8
      * Rhel 9
      * SPDK docs state rhel is “best effort”
   * Questions:
      * Should we run with werror enabled?
      * What versions of SPDK do we test?
      * What versions of DPDK do we test SPDK against?
   * Unit tests pass with the distros which are compiling
* OvS DPDK testing:
   * * Lab sent an email to test-report which got blocked because it
was just above 500kb, which is the limit
* Ts-factory redirect added to dpdk community lab dashboard navbar

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Intel Lab
* None

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Github Actions
* None

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Loongarch Lab
* None

---------------------------------------------------------------------
DTS Improvements & Test Development
* Nick’s hugepages patch will be submitted today (or already is).
   * Forces 2mb hugepages
* Nick is starting on porting the jumboframes testsuite now
   * Starting by manually running scapy, testpmd, tcpdump to verify
the function works, then writing the suite in DTS
* Jeremy is working on the context manager for testpmd to ensure it
closes completely before we attempt to start it again for a subsequent
testcase
* Juraj has provided an initial review of Luca’s testpmd params patch,
the implementation may need to be refactored, but the idea of
simplifying the developer user experience is a good goal
* Jeremy Spewockwill write to Juraj about the capabilities patch. UNH
can test this if needed.
* Other than the testcase capabilities check patch, Juraj will be
renaming the dts execution and doing work for supporting pre-built
DPDK for the SUT
* Luca ran into what may have been a paramiko race condition from when
the interactive shell closes. We are unsure what exactly is happening
but we will probably need to hotfix this. Would likely require some
checks when closing the section.
* Luca tried to run from two intel nics, and could bind to vfio-pci,
but then timed out when trying to rebind to i40e. Left with 1
interface bound to vfio, one interface bound to i40e.
   * Can try rebinding the ports with 1 command, instead of 1 by 1
   * Maybe tried to run dpdk-devbind before all DPDK resources had
been released (just speculation)

=====================================================================
Any other business
* Next Meeting: April 20, 2024