Minutes of Techboard Meeting, 2023-11-15

Minutes of Techboard Meeting, 2023-11-15

[Bruce Richardson]

TB Attendees
------------
Aaron
Bruce
Honnappa
Kevin
Maxime
Morten
Stephen
Thomas

NOTE: The technical board meetings are on every second Wednesday at 3 pm
UTC. Meetings are public, and DPDK community members are welcome to attend.
Link to join:
https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/96459488340?password=d808f1f6-0a28-4165-929e-5a5bcae7efeb

NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2023-Nov-29 @3pm UTC, and will be
chaired by Hemant

Agenda
------

1. Welcome new member of Techboard.
   - Morten was recently invited to join the DPDK technical board
   - He was officially welcomed to his first TB meeting as a TB member

2. Release-critical items:
   - No critical items at this time for 23.11

3. Discussion of experimental APIs
   - TB discussed the idea of having minimum and maximum time-bounds for
     functions being experimental
   - No desire to have APIs sit in experimental state for long periods of time
     without update
   - Proposals for minimum time spent experimental were
       - 1 release cycle
       - 1 LTS release
       - consensus reached that LTS is unnecessary, and one release of DPDK is
         sufficient
   - For max time spent in experimental, agreement that there should not be a
     fixed, hard limit
   - Target of 1 year max was generally felt to be reasonable
       - at that time, APIs should be reviewed and ideally either:
          * moved to be made stable (the expected path in most cases)
          * removed from DPDK as unnecessary
       - exceptions to keep API experimental for longer may be approved on
         request
       - appropriate subsystem maintainer, or tree maintainer, to approve all
         requests for 
          a) exceptions
          b) moving to stable
          c) API removal

4. Lab Statement of Work (SOW) for 2024
   - Tech-board needs to vote on priorities for next year
   - Few missing votes from member:
     ACTION, close within the week or ASAP!
   - Tech-board also to provide a recommendation on developer resourcing in
     the lab
      - mentoring of any new hires in the lab is available, and not expected
        to be an issue for ramp-up
      - suggestion of hiring 2 x undergrad developers, was approved unanimously
        by TB.

5. Discussion of the patchset for the link-bonding framework/driver in DPDK
   [https://patchwork.dpdk.org/project/dpdk/list/?series=29900&state=*]:
    - adds new APIs to ethdev
    - APIs are specific device ops specifically for the net/bonding driver
      [notification of new additions to a bond]
    - General concerns expressed:
       - this makes the driver less generic, and less transparent
       - need a good explanation of the use-case
       - we need details on how to test it
    - needs more details and justification from contributor
       - patchset deferred for now, and will not make 23.11
       - discussion to continue on dev mailing-list

6. Discussion of patchset for new "macsec" example app
   [https://patches.dpdk.org/project/dpdk/patch/20231109210122.2493856-1-gakhil@marvell.com/]:
    - example uses rte_security APIs for macsec
    - suggestion made to consider merging with l2fwd-crypto, but concerns
      expressed that they may not be a good fit together.
    - overall, there is a desire to keep total number of examples in DPDK low
      - should always be on the lookout for examples to remove
      - as DPDK gains new libs/features, some growth in total number of
        examples is to be expected
    - macsec is not commonly found as an implemented protocol in other
      networking SW, so felt it would be good to have in DPDK.
    - TB voted and agreed to accept the example into the release.
    - Thomas will supply a list of tasks for the merge.

7. A.O.B.: 
   - Proposed discusson DTS
     - No time in meeting, discussion deferred for future meeting.