Minutes of Technical Board meeting 17-April-2024

Next Meeting will be May 15th, with Bruce as chair.

Attendees
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- Aaron (chair)
- Morten Brorup
- David Marchand
- Konstantin Ananyev
- Tyler Retzlaff
- Mykola Kostenok
- Paul Szczepanik
- Kevin Traynor
- Jerin Jacob Kollanukkaran
- Nathan Southern
- Patrick Robb
- Stephen Hemminger
- Bruce Richardson
- Honnappa Nagarahalli
- Nathan Southern
- Ben Thomas

Topics
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- MSVC VLAs
- Tyler mentioned this is a blocking issue currently MSVC does not support VLAs and is not going to support VLAs
- All supported compilers, including MSVC support using 'alloca' as an alternative to VLAs, but there is resistance to using 'alloca'.
- Asking for input on how to resolve the issue
- Stephen advocates fixing the libraries not to use VLAs where drivers may be addressed later.
- Tyler has been working on changing some of the libraries
- Bruce, plan to replace the minimum set seems reasonable
- Konstantin, alloca looks unavoidable in some cases and isn't in favor of just blanket replacing it via grep.
- If there is an obvious replacement for the pattern being used, then use it, otherwise maybe look to use static arrays to synthesize an alloca, or other techniques.
- Tyler to continue working and will put series forward

- QUIC library to support HW Offload
- Ask is from the Gov board, and don't have many details
- Looking for an owner for this effort

- TCP Optimization for ML/AI use cases
- Linux kernel does have some kind of story here
- Looking for an owner for this effort

- Kernel header import
- Maxime proposes to automate importing the Linux kernel uAPI headers
- Background:
- Current process need to redefine the same things which exist, or have a current kernel tree for the vduse drivers.
- Concerns:
- Headers for the uAPI have some kinds of licensing exceptions
- Need clarification from Gov board about including the uAPI licensed headers.
- There ends up being issues with maintainership, which versions of headers are included, whether there are kinds of issues with version compatibility.
- QEMU currently does the same as Maxime has confirmed. QEMU seems to only copy the headers needed and updates them only when needed.
- Alternative, can we have DPDK build to point to a different kernel header file location?
This does introduce its own issues (who is responsible for compilation failures, etc). Adding a fixed version in the tree avoids the problem of pointing to a tree.
- Have a mechanism to download headers?
Also has issues - what URL to use? Kernel headers can't come directly from git, need to be sanitized via make headers-install
- Open Questions:
- Can we ask the gov board for clarification?
- Agree to move to the mailing list for discussion

- Coding Challenge
- Ben ran a poll on social media, positive response to the idea of coding challenge.
- Interest looks like rust integration was highest, then protocol integration, ai- integration, and others following
- Rust seems to generate the most interest?
- Questions:
- When is it supposed to happen?
- Next step is to present to Gov Board to get logistics resolved, so best guess is Q3
- How long would it last?
- Scope is quite large for 'rust integration', and it is not clear what the challenge and scope would be.
- Trying to get it in time for Summit.
- Stephen, wants to make sure each time gets attention, ownership, and movement.
- Ben will present the details to the Gov Board

- Next meeting date scheduled for 15-May
- voted

- Mykola has questions about submitting for a refactored PMD series
- Answered some live, referred to the guides in the documentation as well.
- Plan to send a simpler version of the PMD
- Include any restrictions in docs
- Trying to understand the deadlines as well for the PMD submissions
- Drivers generally get merged in -RC2
- Suggestion is to post patches early because reviews will take some time.

- Update on the Gov Board events votes:
- Approved Bangkok event in July
- Will work on aggressively promoting because there isn't much time left to promote.
- Webinar event was attended 1/2 by members of APAC, so it should be good.
- Montreal event in fall will be covered with Gov Board again on April 30.
- Date has been difficult, but looks to be 24-Sep

We are having questions around best practices to submit a new PMD and we don't have a comprehensive documentation around it. And this is sometimes causing frustration.

I assume one of the reasons related to the missing documentation is, it is hard to come with generalized guidelines. But by time, as maintainers we had formed some best practices in our mind and I believe they are mature enough to document.

That is why I suggest forming a new workgroup with tree maintainers, and work on documenting process or best practices to submit a new PMD. This can be a time bound workgroup and task, like one quarter/release. What do you think?