Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2020-12-16

Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2020-12-16

Members Attending
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- Bruce
- Ferruh
- Hemant
- Honnappa
- Jerin
- Kevin
- Konstantin
- Maxime
- Olivier (chair)
- Stephen
- Thomas

NOTE: The technical board meetings every second Wednesday on Jitsi [0] at 3pm UTC. Meetings are public and DPDK community members are welcome to attend.

NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2021-01-13 @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Stephen.

1/ Lab investments
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Did current 101k /year investment reach the goal we set up earlier?
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- The lab is currently used for performance tests, CI
- It helped to find some functional bugs
- It is needed for baremetal tests or performance tests (which cannot be done by a cloud test infrastructure)
- The infrastructure is there, we can use it better

Governing board asks about the proposal to add 30k /year to increase coverage
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The proposal is to increase from 20 to 40 hours per week coverage, adding 2 more student employees.

One issue now is there is one person every 2 days. Is it possible to have the same coverage hours, but having an every-day presence?

Governing board asks Techboard to come with a single name as lab owner
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A lab owner is a project manager that tracks what was agreed to do, and find some help if needed. Ideally, it is a technical person used to develop in DPDK.

No good solution was found. The following ideas have been mentioned:

a/ Round-robin from techboard? A quarterly basis is too short compared
to ramp-up time, and longer periods are too long for one person.
b/ Can it be managed by Linux Foundation? (maybe ask Trishan?) c/ Nobody

Question to ask to Govboard:

- What is the detail of the costs (infrastructure, electricity, people)?

Distributed CI should be high priority, therefore sharing test scripts is important. It might be easier for a company to pay someone working in its own lab.

2/ Offline documentation (.pdf) support
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We can provide an offline-html (archive) format. Indeed, pdf is hard to maintain, and html is a better format (can be interactive with CSS, links between different guides, ...).

3/ DPDK build configuration - future enhancements
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AR to Bruce to create initial version of the DD.
No progress yet.

4/ Asia DPDK Event status
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- CFP should be ready (waiting for translation in mandarin)
- Moderators

- AR: Techboard members to contact chineese colleagues and see who could be interrested in moderating
- ~4 people are needed.
Ruifeng (arm) and Song (arm) kindly volunteered

5/ List of supported OS
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Which distributions should be tested?

In user guide, there is no such list. It looks easier to just advertise what we test.

6/ List of OS to test in the community lab (compilation and functional)
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- For compilation test: a long distribution list is possible
- For functional / performance test: test some distributions, for
instance: ubuntu-20.04, ubuntu-18.04, RHEL8, FreeBSD latest stable, Windows

7/ Plan for KNI (deprecate? move?)
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Postponed to next meeting

8/ Position regarding TRex using a DPDK fork
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Postponed to next meeting

9/ Update on DTS usability
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Postponed to next meeting

I would like to not take all of tomorrows meeting discussing the CI lab. What are the action items still left on this topic?