Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2023-December-13

[Jerin Jacob Kollanukkaran]

Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2023-December-13

Members Attending
-----------------
-Aaron
-Hemant
-Jerin (Chair)
-Kevin
-Konstantin
-Maxime
-Morten
-Stephen
-Thomas
 

NOTE: The technical board meetings 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 2024- January -10 @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Honnappa


1) 5G Webinar Summary

- The scheduled time for the event coincided with the OVS conference, Techboard requested Linux Foundation to cross-reference other open-source conferences listed at https://lwn.net/Calendar/ to prevent scheduling conflicts in the future.

- The Techboard expressed eagerness to organize more webinars and encouraged volunteers to participate as speakers.
Notably, the recent event boasted an impressive attendance of over 100 participants.

- Techboard is exploring the possibility of hosting a virtual hackathon to collaboratively address technical challenges.

2) Process for Qualification Criteria for External Library

TB continued to discuss the process for qualification criteria for external library, Initiated from https://patches.dpdk.org/project/dpdk/patch/20230928054036.645183-1-jerinj@marvell.com/

# Revised policy description based on TB meetings and mailing list discussions

a) Documentation:

- Must have adequate documentation for the steps to build it.
- Must have clear license documentation on distribution and usage aspects of external library.

b) Free Availability:

- The library must be freely available to build in either source or binary form.
- It shall be downloadable from a direct link. There shall not be any requirement to explicitly login or sign a user agreement.

c) Usage License:

- Both permissive (e.g., BSD-3 or Apache) and non-permissive (e.g., GPLv3) licenses are acceptable.
- In the case of a permissive license, automatic inclusion in the build process is assumed.
For non-permissive licenses, an additional build config option is required.

d) Distributions License:

- No specific constraints beyond documentation.

e) Compiler Compatibility:

- The library must be able to compile with a DPDK supported compiler for the given execution environment.
For example, For Linux, the library must be able to compile with GCC and/or clang.

- Library may be limited to a specific OS.

f) Meson Build Integration:

- Libraries must offer a standard method like pkg-config for seamless integration with DPDK's build environment.

g) Code Readability:

- Optional dependencies should use stubs to minimize ifdef clutter, promoting improved code readability.

3) The meeting also addressed the timeframe for existing libraries to align with the new policy, with a general consensus to provide a minimum of 6 months.

4) Security Maintainers Updates

- Thomas expressed his desire to retire from security maintainers responsibilities.
- Aaron and Maxime volunteered to be part of security maintainer roles.
- Cheng Jian, having left Intel, is no longer active in the security team.
- Stephen will consult with Luca to gauge his interest in joining as one of the security maintainers.