February 22, 2024

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Attendees
1. Patrick Robb
2. Ali Alnubani
3. Paul Szczepanek
4. Juraj Linkeš
5. Luca Vizzarro

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Minutes

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General Announcements
* Aaron is polling the tech board for feedback on what server hardware is most needed in the community lab going forward. Some ideas are:
   * AMD CPUs
   * RISC-V CPUs
   * Better PCI-E generation slots which will allow us to use newer NICs
   * He is visiting UNH today so we can work on starting a proposal and plan
* 24.03 RC1 has been released this morning
* Retest framework: Email has been sent out with the proposed syntax and approach for retests in which users want to request their patch be re-applied on tip of branch

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CI Status

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UNH-IOL Community Lab
* Hardware Refresh:
   * NVIDIA CX7:
      * Had some minor improvements in the performance results, but still debugging with Ali and NVIDIA
      * Can possibly replaced the cx5 with another cx7, and do forwarding between 2 nics, solving 1 bandwidth bottleneck
      * Will work on resolving the lower speeds seen on the CX6 first - this could be related to using a different board and CPU with different clock rate etc.
         * This server has a broadwell CPU
         * Patrick Robb Make sure that Ali and Gal are included for the initial feedback thread for server refresh and what is most needed
* Bringing the NVIDIA testbed offline today for a few hours so Ali and Bing can do some debugging on the mlx5 failure on the CX5 yesterday
* Arm IPSEC-MB Library: Had to move to running from tip of main on the ARM ipsec repo to enablev1.4 - just storing the commit hash right now but ARM will publish a new tag for a known good version soon.
   * Wathsala will be doing the new tag soon
   
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Intel Lab
* None

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Github Actions
* We plan to have a maintenance window either Thus the 22nd, or sometime next week to cover migrating to the original server.  This will involve upgrading the base os for both the host and the VM.  Michael  will send out the notice on the day it happens letting everyone know  of the downtime.
   * We don't expect that the downtime will last too long, less than a day.  We will likely recover the workflows shortly after that.

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Loongarch Lab
* Patrick pinged Zhoumin about adding retest framework support to the Loongson lab
   * UNH willing to assist - not sure right now what is possible/not possible based on how the loongson lab stood up their automation. They do use the dpdk-ci repo tools.
   
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DTS Improvements & Test Development
* Dockerfile patch can be merged - Thomas has been pinged about this on slack
* Scattered packets patch:
   * Patrick tested this on a bnxt_en NIC, and it worked fine
   * When gathering device capabilities, the scatter capability is always off on mlnx nics, even when including the scatter offload flag with testpmd
      * Juraj is going to send to Patrick and Jermey a summary of what he has learned about passing the scatter flag and how DPDK handles it. And what he has learned about querying for this capability.
   * For now, not including the scatter offload flag testcase with this testsuite, only submitting the testcase which is a direct port from old dts
   * Luca is going to review this today. He is also running it on a MLNX nic.
   * Juraj: Interestingly, on the Intel NICs it is on whether you include the --enable-scatter flag or not, but the Mellanox NICs don't have it set to on in either case
   * Ali: Have you tried "--enable-scatter --tx-offloads=0x8000"
      * Jeremy Spewockwill try this
* For next Wednesday, We are going to have to have discussions for putting together the 24.07 DTS roadmap since Juraj will be on vacation in March and we won’t be able to have the conversation then.
   * Patrick will put together some ethdev suite ideas which the new DTS employees at UNH can start on
   * We will also review bugzilla tickets then, assign more tickets if needed
* Patch for the testcast blocking:
   * There is a bug (it does not include the smoke tests in the list of suites to run), so Juraj will be sending a new version
* Gregory reached out to see whether his framework’s approach could be used for simple DTS cases. Juraj and Patrick read the code. There are some good ideas we are bringing into the framework, but not the phase based yaml approach which translates scapy and testpmd commands to testsuites.
* XMLRPC Server: Jeremy found that there is a python dependency for the TG server which was not known (must be python 3.10+). Or else you will have an issue with a XMLRPC server function not included until verson x.
   * Should turn this into a bugzilla ticket, and can discuss on Wednesday.
* Scapy version on TG node. Need to make sure we are on x version. Should be 2.4.4 or 2.5.0?
Any other business

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* Next Meeting: March 7, 2024