[dpdk-dev] Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2019-10-23

[Hemant Agrawal <hemant.agrawal@nxp.com>]

Members Attending
-----------------
Bruce
Ferruh
Hemant (chair)
Honnapa
Jerin
Kevin
Konstantin
Maxime
Olivier
Stephen
Thomas

NOTE: The technical board meetings every second Wednesday on IRC  channel  #dpdk-board, at 3pm UTC. Meetings are public and DPDK community members  are welcome to attend.
 
NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2019-11-06 @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Jerin


1. SPDX Discussions
 	Hemant and Stephen provided an update on the gaps to be closed for achieving
 	use of SPDX tags alone (i.e. no license text in files) in 19.11. 
 	Key gaps:
 
 	* Issue identified with pmdinfogen using GPL derived code, meaning
 	  it needs a license exception. Stephen to follow with GB to get exception
	 approval. 
 
	* Few drivers, test files are still having old licensing style.
	  Patches have been created, but we are still waiting for original
                 authors to ack them. 

	* In the worst, we will apply top SPDK tag while leaving the original
	   License text in the file intact for the remaining files.

2. MIT license for Windows.
	- The code has been re-submitted as BSD-3 (or MIT+BSD-3), we will check the legal team for any concerns. 
              -  TB will check for global exception for dual licensing. 

3. Removal of examples (standing agenda item):
	All the removed examples should be mentioned in Release notes.
	Bruce's patchset (5 examples) was agreed.  
	Jin Yu also submitted a patch to remove vhost_scsi example.

4. KNI IOVA as VA support
KNI supposes that mbufs are contiguous in kernel virtual memory. This may not be true when using the IOVA=VA mode.

 -  check original context at http://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2019-October/148339.html
  - It is not wise to break KNI - as customers are using it in production.
  - choice to enable it optionally with EAL FLAG is not acceptable to Jerin. 
  - Olivier's new mempool patch series for " mempool: avoid objects allocations across pages" will help here. 

The decision is to accelerate the review of this mempool patch series and make it part of 19.11 itself to resolve this issue. 

5. VFIO - PF Kernel module
 - enabling SRIOV of VFIO PF device. 
- some members raised concerns for supporting out of tree kernel modules (especially related to VM) as it creates lots of long term support nightmare.
- for this particular module, kernel.org is not in favour on integrating these changes as this may cause security issue with netdev
- mcoquelin and shemminger to review it further and discuss this topic again in next meeting.7