Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2021-01-27

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

NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2021-02-10 @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Ferruh

Meeting Minutes
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Maintainership
* New LTS maintainer approved by TB
* Christian Erhardt will take on responsibility as LTS maintainer for DPDK
* Christian would take on 19.11, Luca to take 20.11

DPDK Asia Conference Event
* AR: Techboard members - review spreadsheet by end of this week
* AR: Techboard members - Complete doodle poll for meeting ASAP

Backport Performance Optimizations
* Ask on mailing list to have performance optimization patches backported into LTS release
* Concerns expressed about this:
- New code is viewed as potentially unstable
- New code for opt is like introducing a new feature - perhaps worse as potentially breaking something working, rather than adding on.
* Other considerations mentioned (some already called out on mailing list)
- Performance regressions should be considered separately.
- Validation support - need submitter to provide validation tests
- Potentially different rules for latest LTS vs other LTS?
- Effort involved for LTS maintainers?
- If any queue for patches, bug fixes must take priority.
* **Consensus Reached**
1. no optimization backports at this point. Fixes for performance regressions will be considered on a case by case basis.
2. AR: Kevin and Luca to document some policies for discussion.

List of supported OS's and compilers
* Previously agreed just to advertise what is tested

Lab
* Meetings ongoing to define objectives for lab
* On-going discussions in governing board re. coverage etc.

DPDK Build Configuration
* First draft of current design doc sent by Bruce to TB
* AR: Ask for TB to review

KNI
* Deprecation moved to recurring items

Status of Trex:
* Has forked copy of DPDK
- Some extra DPDK patches not upstreamed
- Has additional PMD
- Uses old build system
* Trex is used in lab which causes problems:
- New HW/drivers are not supported in forked copy
Further discussion needed on the topic of traffic generators for lab use.