Minutes of DPDK Technical Board Meeting, 2024-06-12

[Honnappa Nagarahalli <Honnappa.Nagarahalli@arm.com>]

Members Attending:

Aaron Conole
Hemant Agarwal
Honnappa Nagarahalli (Chair)
Kevin Traynor
Morten Brorup
Stephen Hemminger
Thomas Monjalon

NOTE: The Technical Board meetings take place every second Wednesday at 3 pm UTC
on https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/96459488340?password=d808f1f6-0a28-4165-929e-5a5bcae7efeb
Meetings are public, and DPDK community members are welcome to attend.
Agenda and minutes can be found at http://core.dpdk.org/techboard/minutes
Next Meeting: 26-June, Chair: Jerin Jacob Kollanukkaran

Minutes:
 
    1) APAC Summit Status
        • Schedule and speakers are online and marketing going well
        • Currently 17 people registered, expected to go up in the coming weeks
 
    2) zxdh PMD requires additional libraries and kernel modules which are not part of DPDK
       • It is good to document specific cases where the drivers will not be accepted. For ex: a driver depends on an SDK that requires paid subscription.
       • Document a use case where the SDK causes license pollution
       • What’s the advantage for someone to upstream just the PMD? 
       • Should we capture the guidelines in DPDK documentation?
       • There needs to be an SDK that can be downloaded to satisfy the dependencies for a successful compilation in DPDK CI
 
    3) Keeping the maintainer list updated
       • Mark the maintainer as inactive
 
    4) What to do with unmaintained code?
        • The code could be removed when there are issues (which can’t be resolved).
        • If there are complex issues with the PMD or if there are bugs that can’t be resolved by the community then the issues will be documented as known issue.
        • If there is a compilation issue that cannot be resolved by the community, that part of code will be disabled at compile time.
 
    5) Kevin Traynor will be out of office for summer. He is looking for help to cover the GB meetings.
 
    6) Update on initiatives – Security, AI, Hyperscalar
        • As per the process – we should have these topics as common topics in TB meetings and go over the status. This will ensure we are making progress.
        • GB asked Thomas for progress in these initiatives. Agreed that Thomas could be the backup and can build some slides for GB.
        • However, the Tech Board should be responsible to make progress.
        • Had a discussion on Falcon in Ultra Ethernet Consortium. One possibility could be to present about DPDK in UEC
 
    7) Following updates were provided to GB in the last meeting.
        a) 'Boring Router' written by Robin Jarry to be hosted in dpdk.org
            • A simple router using DPDK graph library, BSD Licensed
            • Request approved by techboard
            • The document is available: https://people.redhat.com/~rjarry/posts/brouter-dpdk-hosting/
        b) Addition of Linux Kernel uAPI header files to DPDK repo
           • These contain userspace API needed for compiling vduse
           • Other projects such as QEMU do this. Licence: GPL-2.0.
           • Not approved by TechBoard
       c) LTS approved for 3 year maintenance
       d) Process/guideline for accepting PMDs being worked on