DPDK Tech Board meeting minutes 03-September-2025

["Morten Brørup" <mb@smartsharesystems.com>]

Members Attending
=================
Aaron Conole
Bruce Richardson
Hemant Agrawal
Jerin Jacob
Kevin Traynor
Konstantin Ananyev
Maxime Coquelin
Morten Brørup (chair)
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 17-September-2025 at 3pm UTC,
and will be chaired by: Thomas Monjalon.

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

1. DMAdev changes
-----------------
Two API breaking changes to the DMA device were discussed:
- DMAdev breaking change [1a]
- Support for DMA transfers across inter-process and inter-OS domains [1b]
The board agreed to accept these changes in 25.11, on the condition that they pass ordinary review.

[1a]: https://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/17207459.geO5KgaWL5@thomas
[1b]: https://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20250710085101.1678775-1-vattunuru@marvell.com/

2. Drop support for x86-32, or all 32 bit architectures, and/or architectures requiring strict alignment
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The purpose of this discussion was to determine if some architectures are obsolete, so we can deprecate them and save resources for support and testing.
Although 32 bit hardware might not be relevant for DPDK anymore, running 32 bit mode on 64 bit hardware is still common on memory constrained ARM systems.
It was also mentioned that cross compiling to 32 bit ARM implies using the "generic_aarch32" architecture, which has strict alignment requirements.
The CI system cross compiles and performs unit tests for 32 bit mode on 64 bit ARM hardware, so the board is satisfied with the level of testing for 32 bit architectures.
There was no updated information about usage of the x86-32 architecture, and since 32 bit architecture support is still required for ARM, there is no big gain by dropping support for the x86-32 architecture, so the board decided not to deprecate it with the 25.11 release.

3. Guidelines for AI assisted contributions
-------------------------------------------
Policies for AI assisted contributions were discussed.
The formal signoff, with its purpose described in the Developer's Certificate of Origin [3a], places the responsibility on the developer to ensure that the developer has the right to contribute the code. The board agreed that contributing AI generated code does not change or reduce this responsibility.
The board decided to add a link to The Linux Foundation's guidance [3b] to the DPDK Contributor's Guidelines documentation [3c] for clarification.

The board also discussed adding a special "Generated-by" tag for AI assisted code contributions.
Although it might be useful for future purposes, e.g. if AI generated code gets different legal treatment than human generated code, we cannot rely on contributors adding such a tag. Even so, if we define a threshold for the level of AI involvement that requires the tag, that threshold may no longer be valid or appropriate in the future, rendering the tag ineffective.
The board decided not to mandate such a tag for now, but may revisit this, depending on what other projects do.

[3a]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html#developer-s-certificate-of-origin-1-1
[3b]: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/generative-ai
[3c]: https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/contributing/patches.html#commit-messages-body

4. The dpservice project
------------------------
Guvenc Gulce joined the meeting to present "dpservice" (Dataplane Service) [4a,4b], the DPDK based Layer 3 Router component of the IronCore project [4c], which is part of the EU funded non-profit open source NeoNephos Foundation [4d] with the goal of making cloud native sovereign.
The board agreed to include this project on the DPDK web page listing of open source projects consuming DPDK [4e].

Like Grout [4f], dpservice uses the DPDK Graph framework. With Robin Jarry (maintainer of Grout) also participating in the meeting, some of the technical similarities between the two projects were discussed.
The board proposed that the two projects could benefit from sharing information, design thoughts, and possibly some code.

[4a]: https://guvenc.github.io/software%20engineering/2024/10/18/dpservice.html
[4b]: https://github.com/ironcore-dev/dpservice
[4c]: https://ironcore.dev/
[4d]: https://neonephos.org/
[4e]: https://www.dpdk.org/ecosystem/
[4f]: https://github.com/DPDK/grout

5. Review status of projects on DPDK web site
---------------------------------------------
The status of each of the projects listed on the DPDK web site (Grout, Pktgen, DTS, dpdk-burst-replay, NFF-Go, SPP, ...) was discussed, and Nathan will proceed to handle the inactive projects as such.


Venlig hilsen / Kind regards,
-Morten Brørup