[dpdk-dev] DPDK techboard minutes of October 13

[Olivier MATZ <olivier.matz@6wind.com>]

Hi,

Here are the minutes of the last DPDK technical board meeting
held on 2017-10-13.

Attendees:
- Bruce Richardson
- Hemant Agrawal
- Jan Blunck
- Jerin Jacob
- Konstantin Ananyev
- Olivier Matz
- Stephen Hemminger
- Thomas Monjalon
- Yuanhan Liu

1) Vendor trees

   The proposal to introduce new next-net-* repositories for vendors drivers
   has been approved to optimize the process.

   - A specific maintainer for this tree will be in charge of reviewing
     and integrating the incoming patches.
   - The next-net maintainer still has the responsibility of re-checking
     that patches do not conflict with deprecations and DPDK evolutions
     in net drivers or ethdev. This will be described in the
     contributing guide.
   - This applies to the most active vendors, where the number of
     patches justifies the additional work.
   - These trees are restricted to network drivers.

2) API/ABI stability

   a) one LTS per year

      The techboard approved the proposal made at userspace of having
      one LTS per year. The next version (17.11) will be a LTS.

      - Luca Bocassi accepted to be LTS maintainer, he will maintain
        16.11.
      - Yuanhan Liu will manage 17.11.

    b) experimental APIs

       Every new API will have the "experimental" tag, meaning that
       the API is not guaranteed to follow the API deprecation
       process. This won't apply to changes on existing APIs.

       This tag will remain for at least one release, and it is the
       responsibility of the developer and maintainer to send a patch
       to remove it.

    c) enforce acknowledging of deprecation notices

       It was suggested to require 3 acks coming from different
       companies for deprecations. The techboard did not approved it.

       However, the techboard agreed that the ack of the maintainer of
       the related code has to be mandatory (and 3 acks will still be
       required, as of today). The techboard also recommends to have
       acks from different "areas of interest" (ex: nics vendors, cpu
       vendors, sw vendors, ...)

   [1] http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2017-October/077937.html
   [2] http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2017-October/077935.html

3) license of the optimized division code from libdivide

   The original author would like to keep the license of its code and
   declined to put it under BSD [3]. The techboard asks to remove this
   code and rewrite it as a BSD-licensed code. It could possibly be
   based on rte_reciprocal.

   [3] http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2017-October/077338.html

4) update on IPSec offload (rte_security)

   - Discussions are ongoing on the mailing list.
   - Target is rc2.
   - Since it's a new API, it will be marked experimental.

5) VF are broken with igb-uio

   A suggestion was made [4] to revert the initial patch, whose
   objective was to avoid to leave the devices in unknown state.
   It was suggested to give a chance to the fix [5] into rc1.

   [4] http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2017-October/079111.html
   [5] http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2017-October/079159.html

6) next chair

   Thomas will chair the next meeting as Stephen (next per alphabetical
   order) may be unavailable.