A joint meeting of the DPDK Tech Board and Governing Board took place on Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024 to streamline the project’s priorities for 2025. 8 Governing Board members and 7 Tech Board Members (i.e., a quorum from each board) were present.
Review of Three Core Areas of Expansion in 2025 – Maxime Coquelin
As tech board representative to the Governing Board through Dec. 2024, Mr. Coquelin reviewed the three high level initiatives (cloud, security and AI) that DPDK is currently pursuing, and summarized key progress in each area. The following points were made:
- Greatest progress is being made in area of cloud testing. To this end, the team reached out to several big tech cloud vendors to effectuate testing in Q2-4 of 2024 – with a largely positive response. More news on this is forthcoming.
- Expansion in security began with a formal assessment led by Nandini Persad, Akhil Goyal and Thomas Monjalon of the security protocols that DPDK now supports, including MACsec, IPsec, TLS, PDCP. This document assessment also highlights partially supported protocols – where algorithms are supported but no high-level libraries, including PSP and Wireguard. The overall effort will clarify the security strengths of the tech stack as well as areas in which the project wants to make additional progress.
- DPDK’s expansion into Artificial Intelligence needs additional time, thought and definition. To date, the tech board has discussed numerous potential directions for the intersection of DPDK and AI, including: -Using AI for DPDK tooling, -Doing additional work with the MLDev machine learning library, and -using DPDK to train AI models with the prerequisite of a TCP or UET stack. This exploration will continue pending a conclusion.
Development Expansion on DPDK
Governing Board and Tech Board members discussed practicable ways to foment development in the above areas.
1. Recruiting university students. DPDK has fostered strong relationships with universities over its history, including the University of New Hampshire and the University of Massachusetts. This is absolutely an option, but stressed that a specific itemized task list with clear-cut outcomes for any contractor is essential. The DPDK marketing coordinator is also developing a marketing deck that is geared specifically toward expanding the developer community.
2. Hiring contracted developers.
2. Freeing up additional time by the lead maintainer and/or others on the tech board to supervise this code development by university students or contracted developers.
Conclusions
1. It likely isn’t possible for the Governing Board members to allocate more of their time to tech stack expansion efforts
2. It may, however, be possible to bring in students to work on these efforts
3. It might also be possible to hire contractors to work on these efforts.
4. However, either of the last two will require legwork and an approval of fund expenditures by the Governing Board
5. The project is eyeing a major shift in overall emphasis – expansion into new areas rather than improving what it currently has.
Member Prospects
The DPDK project is close to securing additional member enrollments in 2025 through ongoing B2B discussions. News on these will be publicly announced as the memberships are finalized.