[dpdk-moving] DPDK Lab

[O'Driscoll, Tim]

A couple of months ago we discussed creating an open DPDK lab for identifying performance regressions. See http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/moving/2017-February/000177.html for the initial proposal. We agreed to form a small sub-team of those who were interested in participating in the lab, and have had a few follow-up calls involving reps from Intel, Mellanox, NXP, 6WIND and Red Hat.

Because several companies have now joined the DPDK Linux Foundation project who were not involved in those earlier discussions, we agreed at our last meeting to post again on this mailing list to see if anybody else is interested in participating. If anybody is, let me know and I'll include you in the meetings.

As background, the purpose of the lab is to identify any performance regressions in patches that are submitted to DPDK. Testing when the patches are submitted will help to identify problems early, and avoid situations where we're trying to fix performance issues late in the release (as we have been doing with the mbuf changes in 17.05 recently). Doing the testing in an open lab will help to give people confidence in the numbers, and make sure the data is accessible to the community.

As a quick status update on this, we have an initial equipment list now (see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17t8j388wAxwF7B6iuZ5gpkauLMB1ownJe3eIVl4TXUg/edit?usp=sharing), and plan to focus on the specific tests to be run at our next meeting. At the moment the spreadsheet specifies all tests as being run on a daily basis, but we need to determine which can be run per patch and/or per patch set. We're also investigating hosting costs so that we can create a complete proposal that can then be submitted to the governing board for review/approval.


Tim