Minutes of tech-board meeting: 2022-01-12

[Aaron Conole <aconole@redhat.com>]

Members Attending:
        - Aaron Conole
        - Bruce Richardson
        - David Marchand
        - Ferruh Yigit
        - Hemant Agrawal
        - Honnappa Nagarahalli
        - Jerin Jacob
        - Kevin Traynor
        - Konstantin Ananyev
        - Maxime Coquelin
        - Olivier Matz
        - Thomas Monjalon

NOTE: The Technical Board meetings take place every second Wednesday
on https://meet.jit.si/DPDK at 3 pm UTC.
Meetings are public, and DPDK community members are welcome to attend.
Agenda and minutes can be found at http://core.dpdk.org/techboard/minutes

1/ Update for hiring a technical writer

Bruce asked for a review of the requirements from last year to make sure
they are still up-to-date.  We are waiting on Jim St. Leger to also vet
the requirements.
Open questions:
    i. Is this an editorial role?
   ii. How much of the DPDK libraries / code should they be expected to
       learn?
  iii. Tech writer should be expected to lead documentation efforts
       across the project?
   iv. Should they also be expected to work on website doc?  This may be
       scope creep.
Requirements documentation to be linked to the community.

2/ Documentation

We need an introductory description of DPDK.  Thomas to start on it.

3/ Community Lab - SoW 2022 Planning

Lincoln presented a community lab retrospective.  Slides available at:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ii3RBy-MDcw-Bk1eSRC3FnqxLpOXGDnw8VTAZVugD_4/edit#slide=id.g108b683f31d_0_7
There is also a rudimentary planning doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l38GZwaMuIu8hq3kMjoAHDU_LanXXTt-LYS4y7Sv4t8/edit

Lab answered questions from the tech board:
     i. Is the Lab currently running tests against LTS branches?  Yes,
        see dashboard
    ii. Is there any thoughts on improving reliability in 2022?  One
        issue that popped up in 2021 is that much of the maintenance got
        deferred for other development work, so the idea is to make that
        maintenance and technical debt to be an item in 2022.
   iii. Is it still a goal to document the testing?  Many of the tests
        are documented, but documentation can always improve.  Need to
        add it to the SoW if it should be a tracked goal.
    iv. Having test reproducibility w.r.t. Docker?  The idea is that the
        docker containers will be made available to the community and we
        should have some kind of criteria when choosing when to pull
        them.
     v. Trending graph for performance over time - does it make sense to
        add this as a goal for 2022?  Need to discuss.

The lab needs guidelines when deciding on priorities - what is more
valuable day-to-day, etc.

Tech board members to add any items / requests to doc directly or
through Lincoln/Aaron.


4/ Traffic Generator lib/example

Bruce is looking for early feedback / discussion about having a traffic
generator library in DPDK.  The idea is to have a library and sample app
so that developers don't need to rely on external projects.

Thomas asks, "what is the value?"  Response: The biggest value is always
keeping an up-to-date generator available in tree.  Existing projects
like pktgen/t-rex are not kept up to date, or use forked versions of
DPDK.

What is the goal?  Is it meant to be illustrative or compete with
existing solutions?

No decisions made, just open questions.