Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2022-09-06

[Thomas Monjalon]

We had a in-person Technical Board meeting
at the end of the first day of the summit in Arcachon, France.
Some attendees joined virtually, many were in the room.

This is a very late recap of what was said,
mainly based on notes taken by Lincoln, thanks to him.


1/ Testing

Lincoln provided a summary of the Community Lab and the CI process.

Discussed which "rolling" distribution should be used for testing,
group seemed to lean toward support of Arch Linux,
and dropping support for Fedora Rawhide.

When a container upgrade (likely the rolling) starts causing errors,
the previous container must be kept for regular testing,
but we need to be notified of the failure caused by an upgrade.
A badge could be added to the top of the patchwork page,
to represent the status of the rolling distro,
tested periodically on the DPDK main branch.

Honnappa did an intro about the improvements of DTS.
DTS will move in the main DPDK repository.
A future goal is to require DTS update for new DPDK features submissions.
The scope of DTS is testing on real hardware, compared to unit testing.


2/ Security Process

Last week there were two CVEs fixed in all releases in parallel.

There is a specific mailing list, security-prerelease at dpdk.org,
very low volume, with mails coming a few days in advance of the security releases.


3/ Minimum Versions of Software

Meson
It could be interesting to benefit from latest Meson features.

Python
Minimum version is 3.5, which is no longer included in any stable distro.
DTS seems to be aiming for 3.8 as the minimum version,
which might break on older distros.


4/ ABI/API Change Allowances

We had a long discussion about API allowed to break,
and ABI allowed to break every year for LTS versions.
These breaking changes have an impact on users upgrading or not,
and how LTS branches are used.
We need to take into account any change which has an impact for the users.