Community CI Meeting Minutes - March 16, 2023

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

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March 16, 2023

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Attendees
1. Patrick Robb
2. Adam Hassick
3. Ali Alnubani
4. Juraj Linkeš
5. Aaron Conole
6. David Marchand
7. Lincoln Lavoie

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Agenda
1. General Announcements
2. CI Status
3. DTS Improvements & Test Development
4. Any other business

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Minutes

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General Announcements
* dpdk.org published a blog post about Community Lab happenings:
https://www.dpdk.org/blog/2023/02/24/the-dpdk-community-lab-reflecting-on-2022-and-looking-ahead/

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CI Status

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UNH-IOL Community Lab
* The FIPS ACVP tool patch series has a V5 patch series submitted to dpdk-ci
* Since the previous meeting we have enabled Broadcom-25G NIC performance
testing on ARM (arm-gigabyte test bed).
* We have migrated to our new multi-arch pipeline but are seeing an EAL
failure on one fast-test for the ARM containers, so for the moment we are
only publishing x86 results. We are debugging this and also will reach out
to ARM for feedback.
   * We are holding off on upstreaming the DPDK CI Container Build System
until this is complete
   * Ali mentioned throttling the container to only use a few cores.
* Alpine Linux: The lab received a request to re-enable testing for Alpine
Linux, which has been disabled for about a year
   * Unit tests: meson fast tests has some failures on Alpine. David
Marchand has updated/submitted 3 Bugzilla tickets, which when resolved will
unblock Alpine unit tests.
   * Compile tests: Initially saw warning failures when compiling with a
fresh Alpine container. It can compile with certain flags but without the
“default” options from meson.build. There is an ongoing conversation on
this in the ci mailing list - it sounds like David has gotten to the bottom
of it this morning.
   * Quickly discussed compile options for different OSes / containers,
group agreed, CI builds should use the same / generic build options across
all OSes.  Build should target release.
* Gold members are being polled by Nathan regarding their preferences for a
hardware refresh.
   * Responses:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nrXmPY4wi5vffTHExEkHXxKpnk5aGjjkYKGj2Gn3_nY/edit?usp=sharing
   * I have researched the NICs to the best of my ability to determine if
we can support them and made updates to the PCIe slot column accordingly.
It looks like the only requests we can accommodate right now are the QAT
cards requested by ARM and the OCTEON card request from Marvell (pending an
ongoing conversation). All the other requests involve cards which require
gen4 pcie slots where the applicable servers here only have gen3 slots. So,
the lab will have to work with LF and vendors to either get some amount of
new servers in, or modify the NIC refresh requests so that all the new NICs
coming in can run on our existing servers.
   * Is there any information the lab can provide which will help push this
conversation forward?
   * Longer story: What will be the approach going forward to be able to
support gen4/5 cards.
      * Currently we are 1:1 with tester and DUT servers. Is a way to make
the process more efficient going forward using fewer testers and doing
traffic generation in parallel sending to multiple DUT servers.

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Intel Lab
* None

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Loongarch Lab
* None

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Github Actions
* Events API patch has been merged - Aaron is monitoring this today and
will deploy it live if his internal testing passes

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DTS Improvements & Test Development
* Honnappa: “Merging the ‘hello world’ patch was brought up in the
Techboard meeting last week. Thomas has agreed that it will be merged in
RC3.”
* Non-TG smoke tests will be developed first - then we will pick up
developing the TG abstraction
* Work complete on tooling for developing python documentation - Google
docstring format selected. Juraj is holding onto this patch for now.

=====================================================================
Any other business
* Next meeting is March 30th

-- 

Patrick Robb

Technical Service Manager

UNH InterOperability Laboratory

21 Madbury Rd, Suite 100, Durham, NH 03824

www.iol.unh.edu

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