Community CI Meeting Minutes - September 19, 2024

[Patrick Robb <probb@iol.unh.edu>]

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September 19, 2024
Attendees
1. Patrick Robb
2. Ali Alnubani
3. Jeremy Spewock
4. Juraj Linkeš
5. Luca Vizzarro
6. Alex Chapman
7. Aaron Conole

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Minutes

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General Announcements
* DPDK Summit Montreal: September 24-25
   * Some Summit attendees will be visiting the UNH Community Lab on
September 26.
* 9/26 UNH lab visit for DPDK Community Members arrival time has been
change to 1:30 PM.
   * Aaron, Thomas, and Ben are going to carpool down from Montreal
* Jeremy Spewock of the UNH Community Lab (who is now graduated from
UNH) will be accepting a new position and leaving the UNH Lab on 9/27
   * For DTS, He will be working to finalize his open patchseries.
Anything which cannot be finalized by then can be picked up by
Dean/Nick/Patrick from UNH

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CI Status

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UNH-IOL Community Lab
* ARM Grace Server has been ordered for UNH IOL:
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/gpu/2u/ars-221gl-nr
   * Custom build which drops the very expensive GPUs which we do not
need for DPDK
* NVIDIA: Patrick is experimenting with some more of the AMD specific
optimization system configs:
      * https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/linux_gsg/amd_platform.html
      * https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/58017-amd-epyc-9004-tg-data-plane-dpdk.pdf
* AMD Legal wants further clarification on what performance regression
entails at the Community Lab before they can approve further hardware
donations, so Patrick will find some supporting documentation which
explains it, and/or produce a writeup.
* Dashboard Updates:
   * Logs can be opened from within the UNH dashboard now (i.e. you
don’t have to download the zip, extract, open locally)
* UNH team is still troubleshooting our script for reporting the meson
and DTS format checks
* Legacy DTS:
   * David wrote a DTS bugfix for the test-crypto-perf app which is
merged, which cleans up the app output parsing
   * Patrick submitted the local patches we have had for the
test-crypto-perf testsuite which we run on a QAT card on our Ampere
server.
      * One simple patch which trims lscpu output for the testsuite is merged
      * Another patch which loads vfio-pci with custom options David
still has some questions about
         * One of the device IDs in this patch is incorrect, so
Patrick needs to resubmit
         * Pinged Dharmik Thakkar of ARM for this series on some
questions relating to vfio options for this Card

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Intel Lab
* None

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Github Actions
* There was a partial outage of recheck requests
   * Resolved now
   * On OvS project, someone submitted a recheck for an incomplete
series, which caused a bug in the parsing code
* Cirrus CI addition is in progress
   * Has some working code, but it needs to be stress tested
   * Cirrus support would/will need to be added in the DPDK repo.

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Loongarch Lab
* None

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DTS Improvements & Test Development
* Merged patches:
   * API Docs patch merged
      * Any patches which add new files should have the documentation
source added
   * –no-root poetry bugfix merged
      * Jeremy needs to rebase his patch which adds ~/.local/bin to
PATH now that this is merged (so, remove the –no-root line)
   * Conf.yaml PCI address missing “0” bug fix has been merged
* Please make sure as you submit new versions of your series that they
apply on next-dts
* Alex asked about whether overlap between the MTU_Update and Jumboframes suites
   * Both are basically using the same testpmd_shell methods, using
the same validation and providing the same coverage, so there is
really no point in maintaining the two testsuites
* Patches we want to rebase and look to merge soon
   * Xmlrpc server replacement
      * Jeremy indicated he can find time for this in the next days
* Luca’s pydantic patch:
   * For changing configurations (so the other config testsuites) the
best approach is to merge the pydantic patch first, and then rework
the other config patches otherwise without having to worry about the
schema updates
   * There may be no need to maintain the schema anymore, as it will
not be used for config validation, and:
      * Dts.rst will contain the key/values expected in conf.yaml
      * We will provide template config files
      * Pydantic should automatically produce a visual of the dataclasses
   * It may make sense to get rid of the pydantic dataclasses and use
the base model
   * Luca will be workin on this for approx ~3 weeks, Nick and others
working on configuration patches should be aware that we will not
merge any conf files series ahead of that
* DTS Maintainership:
   * Paul and Patrick will be the new co-maintainers for next-dts

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Any other business
* Next Meeting Oct 3, 2024