Meeting Minutes, 2025-10-15

Meeting Minutes, 2025-10-15

[Aaron Conole]

Attendees: 8/11 TB
* Aaron Conole
* Bruce Richardson
* Hemant Agrawal
* Jerin Kollanukkaran
* Thomas Monjalon
* Maxime Coquelin
* Kevin Traynor
* Morten Brorup

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
The next meeting will happen on October 29
The next chair will be Hemant Agrawal

Topics

SOW Retrospective and priorities
* Priority is urgent due to Governing Board deadlines for budget
  decisions
* Patrick sent out a retrospective for the techboard review
* Aaron to kick off the tasks spreadsheet
* Morten asks about running DTS on the "single-server topology"
   * Patrick replies this is currently working with some effort, after
     the BoF discussion at DPDK Summit Prague
   * Paul and Patrick will look into updating the documentation
   * Maybe add this to the SOW for any additional documentation and
     development work to support it properly.
* How to read the retrospective?
   * Patrick to re-review the retrospective to make sure things are
     highlighted appropriately.  Highlighted items are still WIP or not
     planned to complete.

LTS Maintainer
* Should we advertise that we are seeking for someone to do this work
  on the mailing list publicly?
   * There could be someone who is active in the community but isn't
     aware that LTS maintainer-ship needs help.
   * Kevin will send something to the mailing list to try and seek
     candidates.

FAST_FREE vs multi-seg MBUF
* 3 options being discussed to resolve the incompatibility between
  fast-free vs. multi-segment mbuf flags
* Morten proposes that we roll back the mutual exclusivity
  enforcement patch.  This will restore the older behavior, and allow
  tests to run properly, given that tests are setting these flags.
* Better to roll back the patch because it isn't any worse that things
  were previously.
* Need to make a decision before RC-1, and changing this is an API/ABI
  semantic difference.
* Still haven't reached conclusion as what FAST_FREE means, which
  makes it difficult to evaluate the correctness of exclusion.
* VOTE to rollback: PASS - 8 votes for rolling back and postponing
  further discussion.

How to encourage more reviews on Dev ML
* Thomas notes that Tim O'Driscoll, Ben Thomas, and Nathan are also
  be engaged.
* Idea from Ben - maybe having 'credly' badges.
   * Maybe use AI Bot to flag reviews
* Morten is looking for more design and high-level reviews
   * Thomas says solution is to motivate the senior developers to do more
     reviews.
   * Morten has a dev ML, and then manually moves the patches he wants
     to review into a different folder.
* Question: How to flag important series?
   * Maybe an automatic way to flag certain areas of the code as high
     priority?
   * Dashboard may not motivate, but maybe it can help to organize the
     work
   * Maybe some way of prioritizing patches in patchwork - have a column
     and we can sort on this.
   * This helps with the finding what to review part, but doesn't help
     with motivation.
   * New column may be helpful anyway
   * who can work on the column?  Thomas will reach out to Ali
* Maybe metrics for review?
   * Difficult to get metrics, but they can be motivational
   * Challenge: Keeping the current reviewers motivated, and motivating
     the future reviewers.

AI Review requirements
* Apply the series to the correct branches to eliminate some of the
  noise.
* So far, only David seems to be reviewing
* Should have a different name.  'github-post' is not good enough,
  maybe 'AI-review' will get more attention.  Aaron will make that
  change.
* Preference would be to have a link directly.  Could be done as a new
  tag.
* Aaron to change the github-post label, and start discussions about
  a new tag that will do a direct link on the CI mailing list.
* For the future, 'How useful is this?  Should we investigate other AI
  review tools?'