Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2024-November-12

Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2024-November-12

[Jerin Jacob]

Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2024-November-12
 
Members Attending
*****************
- Hemant
- Wathsala
- Kevin
- Bruce
- Thomas
- Morten
- Stephen
- Konstantin
- Shani
- Jerin (Chair)
 
NOTE: The technical board meetings 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 2024- Nov - 26th @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Honnappa
 
# LTS Maintainer Update
- Xiaoming resigned as LTS maintainer for DPDK 23.11.
- A call for volunteers was posted on the tech board mailing list.
- Shani Peretz volunteered and was unanimously approved as the new LTS maintainer for 23.11.
- Kevin and Luca will support Shani during the onboarding process.
 
# Driver Maintenance Discussion
 
A general discussion was held regarding the current state of maintenance for the BNXT driver and
how the community can better support long-term sustainability across all drivers.
 
 
- Community Discussion
* Emphasis on maintaining a consistent quality baseline across all DPDK drivers.
* Importance of clear maintainer expectations and sufficient resources.
* Acknowledgement that hardware diversity limits full validation by subsystem maintainers.
* Alignment between vendors and community contributors viewed as essential for driver reliability.
* All core components (drivers and libraries) should follow similar quality and maintenance guidelines.
 
- Discussion was collaborative and focused on improving processes, not restricting or removing drivers.
 
- Potential improvements considered:
* Adding support-level tags in the maintainers file to increase clarity on driver support status for users.
* Updating documentation to better communicate expectations for new or evolving drivers.
 
 
# Follow-up / Action Items
 
- Await update from Ajit regarding the new Broadcom maintainer.
- Await Broadcom's plan for ongoing BNXT branch maintenance.
- Discuss adding support-level flags to the maintainers file.
- Consider updates to documentation or policy for driver quality expectations.