Community CI Meeting Minutes - February 22, 2024

Community CI Meeting Minutes - February 22, 2024

[Patrick Robb]

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February 22, 2024

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Attendees
1. Patrick Robb
2. Ali Alnubani
3. Paul Szczepanek
4. Juraj Linkeš
5. Luca Vizzarro

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Minutes

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General Announcements
* Aaron is polling the tech board for feedback on what server hardware is
most needed in the community lab going forward. Some ideas are:
   * AMD CPUs
   * RISC-V CPUs
   * Better PCI-E generation slots which will allow us to use newer NICs
   * He is visiting UNH today so we can work on starting a proposal and plan
* 24.03 RC1 has been released this morning
* Retest framework: Email has been sent out with the proposed syntax and
approach for retests in which users want to request their patch be
re-applied on tip of branch

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CI Status

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UNH-IOL Community Lab
* Hardware Refresh:
   * NVIDIA CX7:
      * Had some minor improvements in the performance results, but still
debugging with Ali and NVIDIA
      * Can possibly replaced the cx5 with another cx7, and do forwarding
between 2 nics, solving 1 bandwidth bottleneck
      * Will work on resolving the lower speeds seen on the CX6 first -
this could be related to using a different board and CPU with different
clock rate etc.
         * This server has a broadwell CPU
         * Patrick Robb Make sure that Ali and Gal are included for the
initial feedback thread for server refresh and what is most needed
* Bringing the NVIDIA testbed offline today for a few hours so Ali and Bing
can do some debugging on the mlx5 failure on the CX5 yesterday
* Arm IPSEC-MB Library: Had to move to running from tip of main on the ARM
ipsec repo to enablev1.4 - just storing the commit hash right now but ARM
will publish a new tag for a known good version soon.
   * Wathsala will be doing the new tag soon

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Intel Lab
* None

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Github Actions
* We plan to have a maintenance window either Thus the 22nd, or sometime
next week to cover migrating to the original server.  This will involve
upgrading the base os for both the host and the VM.  Michael  will send out
the notice on the day it happens letting everyone know  of the downtime.
   * We don't expect that the downtime will last too long, less than a
day.  We will likely recover the workflows shortly after that.

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Loongarch Lab
* Patrick pinged Zhoumin about adding retest framework support to the
Loongson lab
   * UNH willing to assist - not sure right now what is possible/not
possible based on how the loongson lab stood up their automation. They do
use the dpdk-ci repo tools.

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DTS Improvements & Test Development
* Dockerfile patch can be merged - Thomas has been pinged about this on
slack
* Scattered packets patch:
   * Patrick tested this on a bnxt_en NIC, and it worked fine
   * When gathering device capabilities, the scatter capability is always
off on mlnx nics, even when including the scatter offload flag with testpmd
      * Juraj is going to send to Patrick and Jermey a summary of what he
has learned about passing the scatter flag and how DPDK handles it. And
what he has learned about querying for this capability.
   * For now, not including the scatter offload flag testcase with this
testsuite, only submitting the testcase which is a direct port from old dts
   * Luca is going to review this today. He is also running it on a MLNX
nic.
   * Juraj: Interestingly, on the Intel NICs it is on whether you include
the --enable-scatter flag or not, but the Mellanox NICs don't have it set
to on in either case
   * Ali: Have you tried "--enable-scatter --tx-offloads=0x8000"
      * Jeremy Spewockwill try this
* For next Wednesday, We are going to have to have discussions for putting
together the 24.07 DTS roadmap since Juraj will be on vacation in March and
we won’t be able to have the conversation then.
   * Patrick will put together some ethdev suite ideas which the new DTS
employees at UNH can start on
   * We will also review bugzilla tickets then, assign more tickets if
needed
* Patch for the testcast blocking:
   * There is a bug (it does not include the smoke tests in the list of
suites to run), so Juraj will be sending a new version
* Gregory reached out to see whether his framework’s approach could be used
for simple DTS cases. Juraj and Patrick read the code. There are some good
ideas we are bringing into the framework, but not the phase based yaml
approach which translates scapy and testpmd commands to testsuites.
* XMLRPC Server: Jeremy found that there is a python dependency for the TG
server which was not known (must be python 3.10+). Or else you will have an
issue with a XMLRPC server function not included until verson x.
   * Should turn this into a bugzilla ticket, and can discuss on Wednesday.
* Scapy version on TG node. Need to make sure we are on x version. Should
be 2.4.4 or 2.5.0?
Any other business

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* Next Meeting: March 7, 2024

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