Community CI Meeting Minutes - September 21, 2023

Community CI Meeting Minutes - September 21, 2023

[Patrick Robb]

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FYI I will be pulling some of these items into next week's CI meeting too,
because due to the irregular meeting date and some people being on vacation
we had low attendance, and I would like to see further discussion on some
of these topics.

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 :)

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