Tech Board Meeting Minutes - Sept. 23, 2024

Attendees
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Aaron Conole
Bruce Richardson
David Marchand
Hemant Agrawal
Honnappa Nagarahalli
Kevin Traynor
Konstantin Ananyev
Maxime Coquelin
Morten Brorup
Robin Jarry
Stephen Hemminger
Thomas Monjalon

Notes
-----

The Tech Board met at a f2f session in Montreal, prior to the DPDK Summit. This meeting went much longer than a typical Tech Board meeting.

Agenda
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* Prep. for the summit
** Make sure people helping to monitor live stream know what they are
doing
** Discussion about board q&a
** Discussion about workshops
** Will need people to help do leading at the workshop sessions

* Code challenge
** Idea: identify and promote tools to help detect issues early *** Tech board needs to give some guidance for this effort, since it
isn't well known how to move forward.
*** Does it have some CI component? Can't just turn it on unless
everything is passing, otherwise it will put expected failures.
** Idea: offer some rewards for these efforts
*** What kinds of rewards to offer?
** Idea: can we also hire someone?

* Events discussion
** Techboard doesn't have much transparency on how the decision for
venue, location, etc. is chosen.
*** Ex: reasoning for venues and locations isn't well known *** Ex: Montreal had difficult visa process which resulted in some
missed in-person attendance.
** Techboard would like to be able to give some input on the process *** Ex: hotels for the events have been costly
** We would like some of the maintainers to also be sponsored for
attendance:
*** David Marchand
*** Akhil Goyal
*** Ferruh Yigit
** Remote / hybrid speaking is going to have to be a way of life. We
should reconsider the remote spoeaker statuses. We needed to scramble at the last minute to accommodate remote speakers.
*** We also want to continue to give preference to in-person. ** Awards, gifts, etc.
*** We used to give awards for different areas, and we would like to
return to doing that.
*** We want to give speaker gifts, if possible.
*** Maybe also do some recognition
**** Thomas to do slides for 'hall of fame' kind of recognition to
contributors.

* Marketing discussion
** We aren't sure what the marketing goals are
** We feel that the marketing for the events was quite good ** Maybe we can have a session with marketing to understand
what the other goals of marketing are.
** Is there a way to have marketing show the value of investing in
DPDK to the users (ie: rather than just taking DPDK code and disappearing)?
** Reminder to interview with Ben during the conference

* Testing
** Intel lab having issues
*** Need to sync with John McNamara and others about the system *** Seems that the Intel CI is in a barely maintained state. **** Ex: Testing old OSes, but not newer ones, etc.
*** Bruce will send a message.
** Ask for the lab to test grout
*** Aaron to sync with Patrick about it
** DTS
*** Basic testing for ethdev to complete by the end of this year *** What are we targeting next?
**** Ex: maybe rte_flow?
*** Need guides for how to run DTS. Maybe youtube videos? **** Presentation at the conference might cover some of this. **** More should be done - blog posts, documentation, etc. ** Testing gaps we might have
*** Kernel has Syzbot fuzzer that just randomly hits APIs with
garbage data to try and break things
**** Can we have something like this in DPDK?
**** Needs to be automated
**** Do we need reference implementations on the behavior to test
against? At least if there aren't crashes that is good.
**** How can we implement it?
** Can we add some kind of testing initiatives to the code challenge?

* Gov. Board
** We haven't gotten many meeting minutes
** We like the rotating tech board representative
** Gov. board gives initiative requests to tech board, but there
aren't any kind of resources attached.
*** would be good to have guarantees about spending time on these
initiatives.
** Need more transparency where possible.

* Tech board
** Need to do more outreach for contributions.

* Feature / Bug tracking
** Make sure maintainers are on the bug database and getting mails *** They are supposed to be
** Kevin will push on bugs to come to resolution.
** Roadmap on the website is out of date
*** Goal is to avoid duplicating work across organizations *** The roadmap shouldn't be used to have some feature requests, but
should really show what someone is working on.
*** Work needs to be tied to specific individuals.
*** Need to remove any outdated details / rework the roadmap display. ** Feature requests
*** are they useful? who will work on them?
*** Formal feature request process might give a false hope that
someone will work on something.
*** Better to be on the mailing list rather than bugzilla so that
others can have involvement with discussions

* TOO MANY PATCHES
** We have a huge patch backlog
*** Stephen can take another pass through the patchwork backlog, but
the whole thing doesn't scale
** Need more reviewers
*** Getting quality reviews where someone will use 'Reviewed-by' vs.
merely acknowledging that some idea is reasonable to accept with 'Acked-by'
*** How to get more people motivated to review
*** Reviews are a large burden right now on David and Thomas
primarily.
** Can we auto-merge patches?
*** Other communities do this, and merge if someone hasn't commented
in a few days' time.
*** If someone breaks code, then it will incentivize people to do more
reviewing... maybe?
** Can we find another person to do the kind of maintenance that David
and Thomas do?
*** Plan is to use the maintainers meeting to discuss
** Ask Gov Board to ask their respective comanies for more reviewers

* Branches
** Maybe restart the short-term stable releases
*** Difficult to see the value
*** Already exists a way to get point releases, someone just needs to
step up for those, but no one does

* Grout
** project aims to replicate CNF/VNF use cases

* discussion about where apps fit
** testpmd and apps naming don't seem right?

* Cloud initiative
** Amazon
*** Wants to participate in CI
** Microsoft
*** Discussions will start soon
** Who else to reach out to?
*** Ali Baba?
*** others?

* Security
** Status doc to be published
** Protocols we want to see?
*** Wireguard?
*** psp?

* AI
** Use as a tool in Patch Reviews?
*** Aaron has some code that kindof does it
*** Needs robust training data
*** Costly to integrate
** Do we need more publicity of mldev?