Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2023-02-22

[Honnappa Nagarahalli <Honnappa.Nagarahalli@arm.com>]

Members Attending: 10
 	- Aaron Conole
 	- Bruce Richardson 
 	- Hemant Agrawal 
 	- Honnappa Nagarahalli (Chair)
 	- Jerin Jacob
 	- Kevin Traynor
 	- Konstantin Ananyev
 	- Maxime Coquelin
 	- Thomas Monjalon
 	- Stephen Hemminger
 
NOTE: The technical board meetings are on every second Wednesday at https://meet.jit.si/DPDK at 3 pm UTC. Meetings are public, and DPDK community members are welcome to attend.

NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2023-03-09 @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Jerin.

1) Agenda topic: Atomic operations abstraction solution

- General consensus is to add support for MSVC in DPDK
- Currently, DPDK is limited to static linking. Adding support for MSVC will allow for dynamic linking among other advantages.
- Porting the use of atomics intrinsics is 70% of the effort required for adding support for MSVC.
- Dropping support for Redhat 7, GCC version 4.8.5 in 23.11 release
	- Thomas had discussions with few people from Redhat and dropping support in 23.11 is acceptable.
	- Kevin/Maxime - EOL for Centos 7 is July 11 2024 - Sounds like a good time to drop support in 23.11. Kevin to check internally at Redhat.
	- MSVC supports stdatomics (atomic APIs from stdatomic.h)
	- This is the way forward chosen for supporting C11 atomic APIs. Shim that provides abstract APIs is not required.
- Adding support for MSVC in DPDK
	- Thomas asked for a write up on current status of support for MSVC and a plan to get the support added to DPDK
	- Tyler will provide this to a point where the support is on par with clang and gcc. This should be updated in dpdk.org.
	- Changes required to support MSVC can be merged after 23.03 release.
	- Patches for supporting C11 atomic APIs will be merged after 23.07 release. The patches can be submitted earlier to the mailing list to get them reviewed and tested.

2) Agenda topic: Deprecating rte_atomics_* and rte_smp_* APIs

- Most of the code in DPDK uses the compiler built-ins now.
- rte_ring library still uses the rte_atomics_* and rte_smp_* APIs. Arm has encountered few performance issues which need to be understood.

3) Agenda topic: MAC address set API behavior

- The definition of the current API is not clear
- The priority is address this for 23.03 is reduced as 23.03 RC1 is completed
- Changing the behavior of the existing APIs is a challenge - One option is to introduce new APIs to manage the list of MAC addresses.
- Need consistent behavior across the drivers
- This needs further discussion with the rest of the community
- Decision was taken to move the email conversation to dev mailing list

4) Agenda topic: Meeting invites on announce mailing list

- Meeting notices do not need to go to announce mailing list.
- Announce mailing list should be only for release announcements and events such as DPDK summits.

5) Agenda topic: Process to admit new library

- Please review the process for admitting the new library.