September 21, 2023
Attendees
1. Patrick Robb
2. Lincoln Lavoie
3. Ali Alnubani
4. Juraj Linkeš
Agenda
1. General Announcements
2. CI Status
3. DTS Improvements & Test Development
4. Any other business
Minutes
General Announcements
* DPDK Summit was Sept 12-13
   * Patrick went to gov board and tech board dinners to give a lab update and talk about future plans for the lab/SOW talks
      * Add next-* staging branches for maintainers, like exists currently for LTS releases
         * “Test on push” function desired, like how 21.11-staging works now?
      * “Reporting completeness” by submitting PENDING to patchwork initially during a testrun, then overwriting later with PASS/FAIL (or similar solution also accomplishing showing reporting completeness)
      * Redundancy testing with other public labs?
         * Patrick produced a document showing what Intel lab tests which the community lab doesn’t: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dDVhUFlk3DoQzf0AvyqaVYzJiCDFx5uAnU6_qbivxe4/edit?usp=sharing
         * TLDR: For DTS, we have basically the same hardware and could likely add the functional tests and functional-smoke tests Intel Lab is using to our testruns. For compile testing, we mostly use the same distros, but a few gaps there can be easily bridged. The most interesting gap in compile testing is we almost exclusively compile with GCC and static library linking, whereas Intel Lab has more diversity like more extensive use of Clang than us, more extensive use of shared libraries vs static, and some use of debug build type.
      * Investigate testing DPDK using cloud platforms?
      * Honnappa asked about adding another DTS developer at the lab. This is probably possible, but it would require additional funding to the lab of course. Will have to discuss further with tech board and bring it to gov board if desired.
      * Poll the tech board to determine what CI testing improvements are needed in 2024
CI Status
UNH-IOL Community Lab
* Mellanox perf testing:
   * Hardware Refresh
      * The CX6 NIC is running with no reporting. It is testing at line rates for performance test runs with frame sizes 256-1518, but is falling below line rate for the test when run for 64B and 128B frames.
         * Ali is going to remote onto the testbed soon to take a look
         * Traffic generator may be the bottleneck - need to check this
            * Use trex-console with arg -rt, monitor traffic stats while DTS is running
      * CX7: arrived in the mail yesterday. I will install in Braum/Lucian today and setup DTS
* Intel 8970 QAT Accelerator card:
   * Have built a custom kernel which Ampere is running now, with QAT drivers statically built in
      * Seg fault when echoing a VF number into (device address)/sriov_numvfs. Sent an email to arm people yesterday explaining this.
* TS-Factory ethdev testsuite has been run on cx5, xl710, and E810 NICS
   * Per conversation with the tech board at DPDK summit
      * We can run this testing periodically, and will be running the full testsuite (for now, no use of the new “dial” feature which reduces the scope from 6000 testcases to a lower number)
      * We will publish a human readable testing report to a “Bublik” website instance on our dashboard
      * We won’t be comparing current runs against previous runs to determine a pass/fail/etc based on how current runs compare to older runs. Those human cycles would better be put into DTS.
* Periodic testing: next-net-intel is now added as a periodically tested branch in UNH CI
Intel Lab
* None
Loongarch Lab
* None
Github Actions
* None
DTS Improvements & Test Development
* Dperf is a new DPDK application which can act as a traffic generator. The maintainer gave a talk at DPDK Summit and Honnappa and I chatted with him about whether we can create a traffic generator subclass for dperf, as an alternative to using Trex, which currently is our only option. We should sync on this soon, although it will not be a part of 23.11 roadmap.
   * https://github.com/baidu/dperf
   * Juraj and Patrick will look more closely at this so we can have a more in depth conversation next week when Honnappa and Paul are here
* Is 23.11 roadmap emailed out?
* We need to hash out the details of creating a class abstracting setting packet configuration, and whether this is needed
   * Using scapy itself is probably most appropriate. Adding another layer is just more work and may be less stable.
* How to inject ssh keys into the container running DTS?
   * It may be best to just bake it in from the Dockerfile, and people can just destroy the image and rebuild if they need a new key
Any other business
* Next meeting is September 28, 2023
* Thank you Juraj and Honnappa for presenting with me :)