[dpdk-dev] DPDK Windows Community call - 18 April 2019

[Ranjit Menon <ranjit.menon@intel.com>]

Attendees:
(Present)
Thomas (thomas@monjalon.net)
Harini (harini.ramakrishnan@microsoft.com)
Bruce (bruce.richardson@intel.com)
Cathal (cathal.ohare@intel.com)
Anand (anand.rawat@intel.com)
Pallavi (pallavi.kadam@intel.com)
Ranjit (ranjit.menon@intel.com)

Eilon  (eilong@mellanox.com)
Raslan (rasland@mellanox.com)
        (yohadt@mellanox.com)
Jeffrey (jeffrey.tippet@microsoft.com)
Omar (ocardona@microsoft.com)
Khoa (khot@microsoft.com)

New interested attendees added to meeting invite for next call:
Haseeb.Gani@cavium.com
shshaikh@marvell.com
nareshkumar.pbs@broadcom.com

Agenda:
------
Meeting for 1 hour as a place holder every 2 weeks.
Expect call to last 30-40 minutes or longer as needed.
Encourage other dpdk.org windows partners to join this call.
Minutes via public mailing list.
a. Current release
b. Improvements/Shared objectives - sync up on the bus/pci and general 
status
    - Mellanox agrees bus/pci port should be our next target
    - Intel has latest bus/pci updates available in windows draft repo
c. Any other business


Minutes:
-------
- Removing rte_panic() calls in EAL (and other libraries)
- Some functions that call rte_panic() are defined as 'void' return.
   - will need to modify these functions - which breaks ABI.
- If we're doing this it would require deprecation notice in 19.05.
- Group discussion on removal of rte panics void returns.
- Might need another definition for fatal error codes
   - Why? The application layer will assess whether something is fatal
   - Better to return what the error is and let the application take the 
decision on whether or not it’s a fatal error.
- Advice is to use current error codes that is close enough to the error 
seen.
- Use a matching a core id error – we should pass back an int-return and 
allow the app to decide what action to take.
- Thomas says Arnon Warshavsky (arnon@qwilt.com) was working on removing 
rte panics last year (eal: replace rte_panic instances to return an 
error value).
- Check the list of what APIs need to change and get the list out now to 
the community in 19.05.
- This woudl be a pre-announcement message to the mailing list – this is 
sent as a patch in 19.05, explaining what will be changed in which files.
- Offline discussion with Arnon: see mailing list for detail.

- What other changes do we need to do in EAL to make upstreaming easier?
  - Open source libraries to support common code (BSD licenses).
  - May need a better wrapper on Linux files to use for windows.
  - Some of them (eg: pthreads) not supported in windows
    - so we did macro substitutions to use Windows threads.
  - Wrappers could be used more widely.
    - Need to work out how to do this more widely.
- Please send your ideas for a solution to the mailing list to seek 
comments (RFC).
  - We need to identify the blockers we’re aware of at the moment
    - Perhaps, TSC is one.
- Send interesting topics for the community to work on.

- Is the bus/pci code available?
  - Ask is to move the bus/pci code over to the latest branch (intel).
- Intel/Microsoft currently working to tidy up the branches & names on 
windows draft repo.

- Any new code for the tree?
  - Microsoft is trying to add new code to existing UIO driver
  - This will be available on windows draft repo (18.08 branch)