Minutes of Technical Board meeting 06-March-2024

Minutes of Technical Board meeting 06-March-2024

[Morten Brørup]

Members Attending
=================
Aaron Conole
Bruce Richardson
Hemant Agrawal
Honappa Nagarahalli
Jerin Jacob
Kevin Traynor
Konstantin Ananyev
Maxime Coquelin
Morten Brørup (chair)
Stephen Hemminger
Thomas Monjalon

NOTE
====
The technical board meetings are on every second Wednesday at 3 pm UTC.
Meetings are public. DPDK community members are welcome to attend on Zoom:
https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/96459488340?
password=d808f1f6-0a28-4165-929e-5a5bcae7efeb
Agenda: https://annuel.framapad.org/p/r.0c3cc4d1e011214183872a98f6b5c7db
Minutes of previous meetings: http://core.dpdk.org/techboard/minutes

Next meeting will be on Wednesday 20-March-2024 at 3pm UTC,
and will be chaired by Stephen.

Agenda Items
============

1. DPDK Code Challenge proposal (Ben)
-------------------------------------
Launching a DPDK Code Challenge series was proposed by Ben.
The purpose is to attract more developers to the DPDK community.
The tech board supports the idea.
Ben will setup a Slack channel to discuss details.

2. Marketing & Tech Writer status update (Nathan)
-------------------------------------------------
Natan gave a brief update on marketing and tech writer status.
The new tech writer has started, and is making positive progress.

3. Lab Server Refresh (Aaron)
-----------------------------
The lab server refresh was discussed.
Multiple tiers were proposed, with 3, 5 or 9 new servers, depending on how much money we want to spend on it.
Upgrading the test environment has more details than meets the eye.
It is important that vendor access to equipment is restricted, so one vendor cannot (inadvertently) affect tests of equipment from other vendors.
When evaluating the remaining lifetime of existing lab servers, we must take into consideration that another three years are likely to pass before the next lab server refresh.
No conclusion was reached.
Discussion will continue on the techboard mailing list.

4. RTE Bitset [4a] / Bitops [4b] RFC (Mattias)
----------------------------------------------
[4a]: https://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20240216102348.480407-1-mattias.ronnblom@ericsson.com/
[4b]: https://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20240302135328.531940-1-mattias.ronnblom@ericsson.com/
Only 15 minutes were remaining when starting this topic, which did not leave enough time for discussion.
Mattias briefly presented the Bitops RFC.
It offers three categories of bit operations:
1) "simple", non-atomic, compiler optimizable, for use in e.g. control plane.
2) "single access", volatile, where each read or write is guaranteed to go all the way through to hardware, for use in e.g. drivers.
3) "atomic", with explicit memory ordering, for use where atomicity is required.
Having three categories of bit operations with similar function names will make code cleaner in the long term.
Features and function names were compared with similar functions in Linux.
The use of C11 _Atomic vs compiler specific intrinsics was briefly touched; this is quite complex, and needs a separate discussion.
No detailed conclusion was reached.
The tech board supports the overall concept.
The use of C11 _Generic to avoid size-specific operations, e.g. rte_bit_op() instead of rte_bit_op32() and rte_bit_op64() was discussed.
When changing the size of a variable, it is a big advantage that we don't also have to update which functions are used on that variable.
Also, many other operations, such "++" and "--", are agnostic of variable size.
The tech board supports the use of C11 _Generic in this library.
Ran out of time.
Discussion will continue on the mailing list.

5. Lcore Variables [5] RFC (Mattias)
------------------------------------
[5]: https://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20240228100928.524277-1-mattias.ronnblom@ericsson.com/
Ran out of time; did not start this topic.
Postponed to a later meeting.


Med venlig hilsen / Kind regards,
-Morten Brørup