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April 13, 2023
Attendees
1. Patrick Robb
2. Lincoln Lavoie
3. Juraj Linkeš
4. Aaron Conole
5. Ali Alnubani
6. Adam Hassick
7. Honnappa Nagarahalli

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Agenda
1. General Announcements
2. CI Status
3. DTS Improvements & Test Development
4. Any other business

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Minutes

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General Announcements
* None

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CI Status

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UNH-IOL Community Lab
* ABI Testing: Our new container images with the new references are built
and in production. We are maintaining the use of xml comparison for LTS ABI
testing, and using the new .so abidiff approach for DPDK main.
* Intel will be donating a new server to the lab (with gen 4.0 pci-e
ports).
   * This will allow for “full” performance testing for the E810, the NIC
requested by Intel for the NIC hardware refresh. If we get the NIC earlier
than we get our hands on the new server, we will run testing on it at
limited capacity on our existing Intel test bed.
* NIC hardware refresh: How will requests from companies who dont produce
NICs or servers be supported at the lab? Can they go into existing servers
donated by other companies?
   * UNH will try to be flexible on this front while also honoring the
requests and needs of the companies who donated the servers
   * We can’t do anything like this without the OK from the company who
purchased the server
   * Some NICs have extensive performance tuning on the servers, others
don’t really
   * Lincoln has put together the full list of devices to be ordered and is
considering these questions, will be following up with the Gov board with
these plans
* Distro testing coverage:
   * X86
      * Alpine compile jobs are back in production
      * Will add Fedora 37, Rhel 9
      * Will drop Fedora 35 (EOL)
   * Arm
      * Will add Ubuntu 22.04, Opensuse-Leap15,  Rhel 9
* FIPS ACVP tool: Ali provided an ACK on this patch series. Pending a
question about patch formatting this will be merged to dpdk-ci by
Thomas/Aaron
   * Aaron is following up with Thomas about getting commit access for the
dpdk-ci repo
* Aarch32 on ARM: We have dry run this internally
   * Use arm32 bit SoC for compiling
   * Malloc_perturb can be disabled
   * ARM will have access to our GitLab for updating the set of tests being
run
* Broadcom25G on ARM: Information has been shared with ARM so they can try
to replicate this perf testing
* Aaron would like to see all the times in the past 6 months when patches
which were marked as failing was merged anyways. He is interested in
suggesting to the tech board that the maintainers should be more vigilant
about checking CI before merging.
   * This happened with a patch which broke windows compile jobs recently
   * This vigilance could also prevent situations like the one from 2 weeks
back when a patch was merged which broke ABI testing at the lab
   * Ideally the lab’s results would act as a “gate” on merging

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Intel Lab
* None

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Loongarch Lab
* None

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Github Actions
* Recently identified a limitation with how their polling scripts work.
They’re trying to fix the way they treat patch descriptions because they
have observed some issues with their scripts. Nothing has been affected on
the dpdk side so far, but they have a plan, it just needs to be
implemented.
* Deployed change to using events API, but NTP information was unstable on
the system they were using, which caused missing some patches. This change
has been reverted for now, pending migration planning. Will keep the
community appraised of the situation. The events API should work fine after
the migration with working NTP on the new systems.

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DTS Improvements & Test Development
* Jeremy will submit a smoke test RFC today.
* TG Abstraction RFC is being worked on, would prefer some more time before
sending it out to the community.
* Honnappa, Jeremy and Juraj will work on the proposal email to the
community offline.

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Any other business
* Next meeting is April 27th

-- 

Patrick Robb

Technical Service Manager

UNH InterOperability Laboratory

21 Madbury Rd, Suite 100, Durham, NH 03824

www.iol.unh.edu