· Welcome and Opening Remarks – Rashid Khan (Red Hat) – Board Chair
· Tech Stack Evolution Updates – Thomas Monjalon (Nvidia) – Lead Maintainer
· Update on Grout – Konstantin Ananyev (Huawei) – Tech Board Rep to Governing Board
· Community Lab Update – Patrick Robb/Aaron Conole (3 min.)
· ‘24 Summit Updates – Evi Harmon, Linux Foundation, Events Coordinator
· Financial Update – Robin Giller – Vice Chair/Treasurer (6 min.)
Quorum was established for this meeting and the board proceeded with business.
Board Chair Rashid Khan (Red Hat) began by recapping on the 2024 DPDK APAC event in Bangkok in early July, which had healthy attendance, great audience participation, and a strong line-up of speakers and associated talks. The board will review the metrics and ultimately decide whether to continue APAC events in 2025 and beyond. Mr. Khan also noted key progress of late in the evolution of DPDK’s tech stack and the perfect membership retention of DPDK in 2024. Mr. Khan closed by touching on the DPDK North American Conference Montreal, scheduled for September 24-25 of this year.
Lead Maintainer Thomas Monjalon (Nvidia) then discussed ongoing strides forward with the tech stack, detailing key advancements, both finished and planned, in the three designated of interest for DPDK: Hyperscaling/Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, and Security. In the first two areas mentioned, the Tech Board is actively meeting with prospective corporate partners and discussing/exploring collaboration. In the third, Mr. Monjalon has been working with the project’s tech writer to author a catalog of security protocols on the tech stack and gaps in this area that can be filled.
Tech Rep to the Governing Board Konstantin Ananyev (Huawei) briefly summarized the tech stack addition of Grout, a Graph Router that uses the rte_graph library for data path processing. Grout comes with a message-based API to configure it over a standard UNIX socket, and a CLI that uses the API. The CLI can be used as an interactive shell, either in scripts one at a time, or in batches. Its main purpose is to simulate a network function or a physical router for testing/replicating real and usually closed source VNF/CNF behavior with an open source tool. The informal GB ‘ask’ of this presentation was to host the Grout router on DPDK after the tech board formally voted to approve.
Events Coordinator Evi Harmon briefly recapped on APAC Bangkok, noting that there were 19 CFPs but 21 sessions were presented, including curated sessions. These sessions included 2 (10%) women or non-binary speakers. There were 44 registrations of which 39 individuals checked in, 35 in person and 9 virtual. Key topics and areas of interest included:
- DPDK and integrating it with other applications – proxy, dpi
- New feature additions
- DTS
- Future roadmap of DPDK
- Generic solution as full stack service
- DPDK usage of 5G
- new challenges, current issues/problems, product information, library development status, development experiences
- Virtualization, formal timing analysis
The Montreal North American Summit is scheduled for September 24-25 at the Gray Hotel in Montreal’s Old Town district; attendees can register for the event for $20 here. The CFP closes on July 31st and the speaker schedule is slated to go live on August 7th. Those who wish to submit proposals to speak at this event can do so at this link.
Vice Chair/Treasurer Robin Giller presented a brief, high-level financial summary of the project’s costs and revenue and noted that the financial footing of the project continues to be secure. 2025 budget planning for DPDK (Q4 of this year) will begin immediately after the Montreal North American Summit in late September. 2024 memberships are 99% closed; the last payment is being processed. Several threads are open on prospective new members. Mr. Giller stressed the slight reduction of the project’s rollover thanks to a higher expenditure than revenue in 2024, so it will be important in successive years (2025) to bring expenditures closer to the level of revenue so that the gap between the two is increasingly smaller.