[dpdk-dev] DPDK.org Community Call - Sept 24 - Discuss Growth, Improvements

[O'Driscoll, Tim]

Thanks to everybody who attended and provided input at last week's meeting. It was a good, open discussion, and hopefully is the first step towards structuring the DPDK project to facilitate its continued growth.

I've included a summary of the discussion below. Please feel free to provide any additional input, or to clarify/correct if I've misrepresented anything below.

The key follow up action is to continue this discussion at the Userspace event in Dublin next week. We have a discussion topic on this on the Thursday afternoon (see https://dpdksummit.com/us/en/userspace2015). Following the Userspace event we'll determine what additional calls and/or mailing list discussions are required.


Attendees: Alejandro Lucero (Netronome), Andrew Harvey (Cisco), Andrey Chilikin (Intel), Aws Ismail (Ciena), Bernard Iremonger (Intel), Bill Fischofer (Linaro), Bruce Richardson (Intel), Damjan Marion (Cisco), Daniel Mrzyglod (Intel), Dave Barach (Cisco), Dave Hunt (Intel), Dave Neary (Red Hat), Declan Doherty (Intel), Ed Warnicke (Cisco), Fan Zhang (Intel), Gary Mussar (Ciena), Harry van Haaren (Intel), Jasvinder Singh (Intel), Jianfeng Tan (Intel), Jim St Leger (Intel), John Bromhead (Cavium), John McNamara (Intel), Keith Wiles (Intel), Margaret Chiosi (AT&T), Mike Glynn (Intel), Mike Holmes (Linaro), Pablo de Lara Guarch (Intel), Pradeep Kathail (Cisco), Prasanth Kannan (), Reshma Pattah (Intel),  Roger Melton (Cisco), Santosh Shukla (Linaro), Sergio Gonzalez Monroy (Intel), Siobhan Butler (Intel), Thomas Herbert (Red Hat), Thomas Monjalon (6WIND), Tim O'Driscoll (Intel), Venky Venkatesan (Intel)

Note that this info was pulled from the GoToMeeting tool, but people joined and left at different times during the call so it may not be a complete list.


Purpose: 
1. Structure for growth: Do we have the community practices, policies, and procedures in place to allow us to continue to grow on our current trajectory?
 
2. Gaps Limiting Participation: What gaps do companies who would like to participate/contribute to DPDK.org see? What changes would they like to see made to improve the project?


Minutes:
The main topics that were discussed were:

Is the project structured correctly to manage continued growth?
- We've seen a steady increase in total contributions and number of contributors from one release to the next.
- Some participants felt that decisions seem to be arbitrary and come down to a couple of people being vocal on the mailing list. We need to determine a better decision making process.
- Some participants felt that DPDK needs to pay more attention to its consumers and are not sure that the current structure encourages this.

Several companies have ARM ports and other enhancements to DPDK that have not been upstreamed. What's preventing this from happening?
- There are concerns that DPDK is currently very focused on x86 and PCI-based devices, and would not be receptive to an ARM port. How do we get a more balanced approach? The technical issues can be fixed, but it's not clear whether the SoC vendors believe the project structure/governance is sufficient to accept these kinds of changes. Several people have heard these concerns expressed in private, but they have not be aired in public.
- A concern was expressed that we haven't heard sufficient input from Linaro/ARM vendors on this. How do we get more input from them?

Should the project be governed by a single company?
- There were several acknowledgements of the contribution that Thomas Monjalon has made to the project, including the fact that he completed the 2.1 release while on vacation. There was a concern though that this dependency on a single key individual doesn't scale as the project continues to grow.
- Some participants stated that they would have more confidence in the project if it wasn't run by a single company. Having a broader governance structure would help the project scale and make sure it's independent of any single company's business interests. This is largely a perception issue and no patches have been rejected so far because they conflict with the business interests of community members. A concern was expressed that the resistance seen to upstreaming an IPsec sample application may fall into this category in future.
- Discussed the creation of a Technical Steering Committee, which was proposed previously on the mailing list. Some expressed the view that this should be composed of contributors to the project, others that it should be more balanced between contributors and consumers.

Convergence between DPDK and ODP came up a few times. Agreed that the focus of this discussion was on governance and that convergence needs to be dealt with separately.

Next steps:
- For those attending the Userspace event in Dublin, we have a discussion topic on this on the Thursday afternoon (see https://dpdksummit.com/us/en/userspace2015). Those who are interested in continuing this discussion should attend that session.
- Following the Userspace event we'll determine what additional calls and/or mailing list discussions are required.


Thanks,
Tim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dev [mailto:dev-bounces at dpdk.org] On Behalf Of St Leger, Jim
> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 8:15 AM
> To: dev at dpdk.org
> Subject: [dpdk-dev] DPDK.org Community Call - Sept 24 - Discuss Growth,
> Improvements
> 
> I am going to host a community call on Thursday Sept 24 at 7:00am
> Pacific daylight time.  The conference call dial-in info via GoToMeeting
> is pasted below.  Here is the background and objective of the
> discussion.
> 
> The DPDK community continues to grow.  Here are some stats on the 2.1
> release from August 17th:
> => 827 commits. A growth of ~50% over the 2.0 release.
> => 82 individual committers. A growth of ~33% over the 2.0 release.
> The number of companies contributing has also continued to grow.
> 
> There is a strong desire to continue to grow and solidify the community.
> But the growth brings up the question of how the community is structured
> to scale.   Additionally, there are many private DPDK repositories
> across the industry (e.g. ARM ports, for example.)  There are a myriad
> of reasons why companies have elected to keep their DPDK code and ports
> private versus put them into the DPDK.org community. We as a community
> need to understand and explore these reasons and work towards enabling
> inclusion.
> 
> During this gathering I'd like to bring together the DPDK community
> including:
> a) the DPDK code contributors,
> b) the consumers of DPDK downstream (VNF vendors, etc.),
> c) private branch DPDK creators/consumers, and
> d) anyone else interested in the growth and future of the DPDK open
> source software project.
> 
> The call will focus on two topics:
> 
> 1)    Structure for growth:
> 
> Do we have the community practices, policies, and procedures in place to
> allow us to continue to grow on our current trajectory?
> 
> 
> 
> 2)    Gaps Limiting Participation:
> 
> What gaps do companies who would like to participate/contribute to
> DPDK.org see?
> 
> What changes would they like to see made to improve the project?
> 
> I hope people can attend AND that they will join and speak up and be
> heard. The success and growth of the community depends on YOU!
> 
> Thanks,
> Jim
> =========================================
> DPDK Community Call
> 
> Thu, Sep 24, 2015 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM GMT Daylight Time
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> 
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> 
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>