Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2023-01-25

[Bruce Richardson]

NOTE: The technical board meetings are on every second Wednesday at
https://meet.jit.si/DPDK at 3 pm UTC.  Meetings are public, and DPDK
community members are welcome to attend.

NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2023-02-08 @3pm UTC, and will be
chaired by Hemant.

Agenda Items
============

New Library Acceptance
-----------------------

- TB agreed the need for a documented process for accepting new
  libraries into DPDK
- Doing a proper RFC and then full patchsets is significant work and
  getting early approval-in-principle that a library is suitable for
  DPDK will help avoid wasted effort if it is not suitable
- As part of the process, our guidelines should document what needs to
  be covered in the initial library RFC submission
  - any licensing constraints
  - justification for adding to DPDK
  - any other implementations of the same functionality in other
    libs/products and how this version differs.
- Jerin has already made an initial proposal on the mailing list
- Action: Jerin to propose an official process/policy by way of
  documentation patch for DPDK contributing guide.
  - to be discussed on-list
  - voted on by Tech-Board at next meeting

Review of Proposed Libraries for DPDK 23.03
--------------------------------------------

PDCP Library
- library is solving a single problem
- library offers complete support for full or partial protocol offload
- designed in the same way as existing IPSec library in DPDK
- Library approved in principle for inclusion in DPDK

MLDev Library
- library for inference functionality only
- model creation is out of scope for library
- for use cases of offloading raw packets, or lightly processed packets
  to inference engine
- Library approved in principle for inclusion in DPDK

Memarea Library
- Jerin provided best-effort explanation of library purpose and
  functionality
- library for giving blocks of memory for general DPDK use
- memory may be of different types and not necessarily pinned or
  dma-capable
- can request memory from certain specific registered ranges
- Stephen H. to investigate similar functionality which is believed
  available in some malloc libraries, to see if we can learn from those
  whether this may fit in our existing malloc code.
  - felt that merging would reduce duplication, and avoid confusion
    about the number of memory allocation/free functions DPDK supports
  - concern expressed about perf of rte_malloc
- library was felt to be providing a fast-path variable-size allocator
  for DPDK:
  - DPDK mempools provide existing fast-path allocator but for
    fixed-size blocks only
  - DPDK rte_malloc provides variable allocations, but is not for
    fast-path use
- Decided to invite author in to a future techboard meeting to discuss
  further

PMU Library
- library to expose HW performance counters from various architectures
- plans to link this in with DPDK trace functionality
- TB ask to try and keep functionality in new library, rather than in
  EAL
- concern about variance in both counters and methods of counting across
  architectures
  - felt this just needed to be covered in documentation
- Library approved in principle for inclusion in DPDK

Splitting EAL
--------------

- Bruce reminded TB about patchset to extract logging functionality from
  EAL into separate library
  - also covered other (unsuccessful) attempts to extract other parts
    cleanly
- Morten suggested looking to extract out per-architecture parts, or
  per-OS parts of EAL
- Thomas suggested alternative approach of extracting the EAL init -
  higher level parts - of EAL rather than looking to extract out the
  low-level bits first.
- More discussion to follow - few people actually looking into problem,
  so help needed.

Conference
-----------

- Question asked about planning for a conference or meetup for DPDK this
  year.
- Thomas informed TB that there was a small marketing team looking at
  this, but nothing likely to be organised in early part of the year.