[dpdk-moving] Minutes from "Moving DPDK to Linux Foundation" call, February 7th

["O'Driscoll, Tim" <tim.odriscoll@intel.com>]

Here are my notes from yesterday's call. Please feel free to correct any errors or to add additional details.

Attendees: Ed Warnicke (Cisco), Erez Scop (Mellanox), George Zhao (Huawei), Hemant Agrawal (NXP), Jan Blunck (Brocade), Jaswinder Singh (NXP), Jim St. Leger (Intel), Keith Wiles (Intel), Kevin Traynor (Red Hat), Matt Spencer (ARM), Thomas Monjalon (6WIND), Tim O'Driscoll (Intel), Vincent Jardin (6WIND).

Firstly, here are some links to help keep track of things:
Project Charter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x43ycfW3arJNX-e6NQt3OVzAuNXtD7dppIhrY48FoGs
Budget estimate: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-3686Xb_jf4FtxdX8Mus9UwIxUb2vI_ppmJV5GnXcLg/edit#gid=302618256
Reference Lab Proposal: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/moving/2017-February/000177.html
Technical governance, including info on Maintainers and sub-trees: http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/contributing/index.html & http://dpdk.org/dev.
Summary of discussion at Userspace event in Dublin: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2016-October/049259.html
Minutes of January 10th call: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/moving/2017-January/000136.html
Minutes of January 17th call: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/moving/2017-January/000157.html
Minutes of January 24th call: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/moving/2017-January/000162.html
Minutes of January 31st call: http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/moving/2017-February/000176.html


Public meetings of Tech Board and Governing Board:
- At their last meeting the Tech Board proposed restricting meetings to just Tech Board members. Mike Dolan raised a concern over this because every LF project has open Tech Board meetings. The Tech Board will reconsider this in their next meeting.
- We discussed whether Governing Board meetings should be public as well. The reasons for not doing this have been discussed previously. GB issues that can't be discussed in public include legal issues, confidential budget discussions, discussion on potential new project members that have not yet been made public etc.
- Agreed that GB meetings will not be public. Vincent agreed to remove his objections to this. The board will review this again in future to make sure there's sufficient communication to the rest of the community.
- Ed clarified that the GB should be able to invite others to attend for specific topics. I'll add this to the charter.
- Kevin asked about communication to Silver members who are not represented on the GB. We agreed that this would be at the discretion of the board when it's formed. In practice, the expectation is that almost everything will be in the public minutes anyway.

Target launch date for the project:
- We discussed whether we should pick a target date to launch the project, so that we have a date to work towards.
- We agreed to target a launch to coincide with ONS (http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/open-networking-summit) which is from April 3-6. We can change this if that turns out to be unrealistic.

Reference lab proposal:
- We discussed the reference lab proposal that I posted on the moving and ci mailing lists on Friday (http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/moving/2017-February/000177.html). The key thing to agree on first is the purpose of the lab. Lower-level details (required hardware etc.) can be agreed later once we're clear on the purpose.
- This is not an issue that gates the launch of the project. We can continue to work this after the launch if there's not agreement before then.
- Ed highlighted https://docs.fd.io/csit/rls1701/report/ as an example of what we may want to aspire to.
- In previous discussions, there's been a strong desire to keep costs low. So, we need to balance scope versus cost. The current proposal is an attempt to keep costs to a minimum while still establishing a lab that serves a useful purpose for the project.
- Discussed the different hosting models: 1) open lab hosted in independent data center; 2) publicly accessible labs hosted by individual vendors using a similar model to the OPNFV Pharos project (https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/pharos/Pharos+Home); 3) a distributed setup similar to what exists for CI where vendors do performance testing internally and then publish the results. The concern with options 2 and 3 is that they're difficult to manage and that it's difficult to ensure consistency.
- Discussed whether the lab should be used to host new (and therefore unstable) hardware. The consensus was that the purpose is to identify performance regressions so it should be limited to hardware that's stable and well-proven, and the configuration should be kept very stable so that performance results can be compared accurately with previous data.
- Agreed that because of this the lab would not be useful for testing the latest NICs and the latest NIC-related features. It should be focused on performance regression testing of DPDK software changes.
- We need to consider how the results are published. Is this done automatically or do they need to be reviewed first? The target should be to have the lab sufficiently stable for this to be done automatically, but we may need to review at first in order to have confidence in the numbers.
- We need to consider how to trigger tests in the lab (e.g. patchwork trigger for Jenkins).
- We'll discuss again next week when more people have had time to review the draft proposal.


Next Meeting:
Tuesday February 14th at 3pm GMT, 4pm CET, 10am EST, 7am PST. Access numbers for the call are:
  Skype meeting: https://meet.intel.com/tim.odriscoll/97F0Q1HF
  France: +33 1588 77298
  UK: +44 179340 2663
  USA: +1 916 356 2663	
  Bridge Number: 5
  Conference ID: 120705852