Re: [dpdk-ci] Minutes of DPDK Lab Meeting, February 26th

[Aaron Conole <aconole@redhat.com>]

"O'Driscoll, Tim" <tim.odriscoll@intel.com> writes:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Thomas Monjalon [mailto:thomas@monjalon.net]
>> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2019 3:20 PM
>> To: ci@dpdk.org
>> Cc: O'Driscoll, Tim <tim.odriscoll@intel.com>
>> Subject: Re: [dpdk-ci] Minutes of DPDK Lab Meeting, February 26th
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> 28/02/2019 15:49, O'Driscoll, Tim:
>> > OVS Tests:
>> > - Jeremy and Aaron are working on setup of the temporary hardware.
>> > - There are two options for hardware to run this on when the setup is
>> complete: 1) use existing vendor hardware; 2) obtain standalone servers
>> for OVS testing. The OVS team's preference is option 2. It's not
>> realistic to expect a vendor to provide hardware to run a competitor's
>> products so we'd need to find a different way to procure this. Aaron
>> will check with Rashid to see if budget is available from Red Hat. I'll
>> check with Trishan to see if the DPDK project budget could cover this.
>> > - The OVS focus is on functional tests, not performance tests. The
>> DPDK lab is currently set up so that each vendor has complete control
>> over performance tests & results on their hardware. If we use separate
>> hardware for the OVS tests, we need to ensure that we restrict scope to
>> functional tests so that it does not conflict with this principle in
>> future.
>> 
>> I am not sure to understand.
>> In my opinion, the purpose of this lab is to have properly tuned
>> hardware
>> for running a large set of tests. We should be able to run various
>> tests
>> on the same machine. So the OVS tests, like any new test scenario,
>> should be run on the same machine as the performance tests.

This is definitely something I support as well.

>> I think we just need to have a job queue to run tests one by one,
>> avoiding a test to disturb results of another one.
>> 
>> Why are we looking for additional machines?

I think because there is no such kind of job queue available, currently?
I don't recall if an exact reason was given other than the nebulous fear
of "breaking the existing setups".

> That was my assumption too. I believe the reason is that the OVS team
> want to validate with multiple vendor NICs to be sure that nothing is
> broken. We only have Intel and Mellanox hardware in our lab at
> present, so we don't cover all vendors.
>
> Aaron and Ian can provide more details.