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nsouthern

Feb 27
Love1

DPDK Governing Board Meeting Summary – 2/2/23

By Governing Board Minutes

Marketing Evaluation: A discussion took place regarding a pending choice between a proposed customization of the current Linux Foundation Tier 3 marketing package and a proposed outsourcing to Open Infra, a small marketing agency in Frisco, Texas. Hilary Carter, SVP of Research and Communications for Linux Foundation, joined the meeting and led board members through a deck that presented many of the benefits associated with retaining Linux Foundation as our marketing arm; the board also reviewed the presented benefits of outsourcing. Ultimately a formal decision was deferred by the board until a successive Governing Board meeting. The board requested a comparison of the two options with quantified breakdowns of deliverables in the interim. A formal vote and decision will take place at the next Governing Board meeting on the basis of these findings. 

Member Renewal and Budget Discussion: Most members have either paid their 2023 LF project renewals or set renewals in motion; those that haven’t have expressed a firm commitment to doing so.

A 2023 budget review detailed the carryover from 2022, as well as the projected membership dues and expenses for 2023, including rough high-level projections for marketing and events, bearing in mind that forthcoming decisions in both areas will help define and shape these costs more precisely. Overall the project is in a strong place fiscally with a surplus, and the Governing Board voted to approve the 2023 budget with no immediate objections presented.

Events Discussion: A discussion took place regarding options for a single in-person DPDK event, likely to take place in September 2023. The team has explored various cities as possibilities and leans toward Dublin, Ireland given the logistical feasibility of this choice, the presence of several tech heavyweights in that area and the strong turnout for prior Open Source events over the past year.  With this in mind, the LF events coordinator has been asked to run high-level costs, including venue costs, for Dublin at that time. It was agreed that said event will be a hybrid one, with live and virtual options. Specific costs from the coordinator will be reviewed by Board Members via email, and formal decisions on venue and event budget made in successive Governing Board meetings. 

Feb 24
Love1

The DPDK Community Lab: Reflecting on 2022 and Looking Ahead

By Blog

Hosted by The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL), the DPDK Community Lab exists to provide prompt and reliable continuous integration(CI) testing for all new patches submitted to DPDK by its community of developers. Every time a patch is submitted to DPDK Patchwork, it is automatically applied to the main DPDK branch, or the appropriate next- branch, and run across our test beds. Now entering its 6th year in operation, the Community Lab has progressed beyond its initial goal of simply providing performance testing results. Test coverage is also provided for functional, unit, compile, and ABI testing across a wide array of environments. This has brought greater development stability and feedback to the DPDK developer community, and also to DPDK gold project members who are eligible to host their resources (NICs, CPUs, etc.) at the UNH-IOL lab. This is a great value provided not only to DPDK at large, but also to the participating vendors who would otherwise have to host this testing in house at a significant cost or develop their products without the reliable and timely feedback that CI testing provides.

In 2022, the Community Lab again expanded on its existing operations. Members of the Community Lab submitted patches to DPDK and DTS in order to increase testing and demonstrate DPDK functions. This year, we also broadened the reach of our testing on a hardware coverage level and test case level. With new Arm servers, updated NICs from our participating members, and our furthered use of containerization, we have greatly diversified the set of environments under testing. Specific examples of developments and happenings in the Community Lab this year include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Submitted patches to DPDK in order to bring its FIPS compliance and FIPS sample application up to date with new processes from NIST, and set up CI infrastructure to test and demonstrate these capabilities across crypto-devs and algorithms. 
  • Expanded hardware testing coverage by introducing newer, higher capacity NICs, as well as expanded our test coverage on ARM based systems.
  • Expanded DPDK branch coverage, including the new LTS “staging” branches. By incorporating these branches into the CI testing process, we can provide greater stability for LTS backporting. 
  • Participated in the DPDK Test Suite (DTS) working group to develop the new DTS and incorporate it into the DPDK main repository. Our contributions included collecting feedback from the community to determine requirements for DTS, setting new formatting standards and development best practices to provide high quality code, and developing a testing approach that provides a consistent environment between users by containerizing DTS.
  • Developed and upstreamed a container building system to the DPDK-CI repository.
  • Updated our Linux distribution test coverage list based on community feedback.
  • Worked with Microsoft to bring DPDK unit testing to Windows.
  • Made the necessary changes in our internal infrastructure and in DPDK to enable OpenSSL unit testing in the lab.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done at the DPDK Community Lab, and we’re looking forward to the 2023 goals. We will work to maintain the test coverage we’ve built up over years and push to demonstrate and test more features according to the desires of the community and our participating vendors. On the hardware side, we aim to introduce new NICs for testing, and incorporate other types of hardware accelerators where possible. Ideally, we will also partner with more DPDK gold member companies to provide our CI testing on their platforms and equipment. Another goal is to expand our traffic generator options so we can provide testing on a broader range of environments. On the software side, the Community Lab will continue making contributions toward the development of new DTS, implementing an email based retesting framework, and increasing our contributions and involvement with the DPDK continuous integration repo. We want to strengthen CI testing within our own lab, but also across the entire community. We’re going to continue engaging with the DPDK CI community, and as always, anyone interested in our work or CI testing in general can find us bi-weekly at the DPDK Community CI meetings. We look forward to writing another blog post in one year’s time to review and reflect on the progress made in the lab during the 2023 calendar year!

Oct 12
Love1

DPDK Governing Board Meeting Summary – 10/11/22

By Governing Board Minutes

Brief Summary of Governing Board Minutes from 10/11/22

Introduction: Two new arrivals on the project, Robin Giller of intel (replacing St. Leger) and Evi Harmon of LF Marketing (replacing Emily Ruf) introduced themselves and discussed their professional backgrounds.

Changes in Representation: A discussion took place on the pending replacement of the Governing Board Chair. The group also discussed the prospective addition of a vice chair to DPDK, which will necessitate modifications to the language of the current DPDK charter. The group agreed to formally make this decision regarding new charter language, and proceed with the vice chair nomination, via email.

Marketing and Events Updates: The group recapped on registration numbers and attendance for Userspace, and also discussed issues tied to the virtual experience on Zoom for Userspace attendees and strategic ways to enhance the virtual (remote) experience in the future. Several End User Stories were reviewed, as well as forthcoming marketing and outreach efforts.

Financial Updates: DPDK is in healthy financial shape at present, but the networking industry in general faces some key challenges over the coming year. The project is currently in the process of going through membership renewals for 2023.  We need Governing Board approval on the Statement of Work for the University of New Hampshire Community Lab for 2023.

UNH Lab Updates: Operational costs for the Lab in 2023 have increased slightly despite no changes to the SOW. The Governing Board requested additional clarity on this and agreed to seek it via email prior to approving said budget.

Tech Board Updates: The GB tech board rep discussed some concerns regarding the merge of a new Google Driver, tied to the fact that the base code has an MIT license, and the DPDK charter only covers a BSD license. The group discussed the proposed modification of the DPDK charter to cover both licenses. The process of hiring a tech writer is underway. The group also discussed the addition of KPI trackers in the near future.

Discussion re: Changing Perceptions of DPDK: Some concerns were raised during the Userspace event about the  public perception that DPDK has a high barrier to entry. Comments shared at Userspace indicated a concern about DPDK’s high barrier to entry. A team is now looking into the comment to see if it’s a widely shared view, and if it is, what might the project community do about it. 

Aug 31
Love1

DPDK Governing Board Meeting Summary – August 23, 2022

By Governing Board Minutes

Brief Summary of Governing Board Minutes from 8/23/22

We did have a quorum present for this meeting, with 8 governing board representatives present.

Introduction: As chair, Jim St. Leger called the meeting to order and welcomed Daniel Havey of Microsoft as Doug Stamper’s interim replacement. 

Changes in Representation: Jim St. Leger announced that he will be departing DPDK as the Intel rep and corresponding chair, to be replaced as Intel representative by Robin Giller. Nominations for chair will be collected via email for a replacement chair by Nathan Southern as PM. Mr. Southern went over this basic process and how it will break down. Mr. St. Leger also discussed changes in the member directory and encouraged governing board representatives who have never sat in on the tech board to do so, likewise encouraged participation in the marketing and events team.

Financial Updates: Rashid Khan discussed project’s overall financial health, and surplus with $1.14 million in the bank by EOY 2022. All sponsors are current on dues owed. Total cost of Userspace $150k, attendance records somewhat low for in person but many virtual attendees. Some financial headwinds noted for 2023, and on that note, the project’s Golden Deck needs to be updated. Mr. Southern agreed to follow up with Mr. Khan on this subject in September. Mr. Khan recommended that we identify someone to champion the use of funds moving forward.

DPDK Marketing and Events: Mr. Southern gave a brief marketing update – around 70 commits for userspace, 30 in person, 40 virtual. 18 commitments for hackathon on September 6th. Remote registration fees have been waived and around $1000 refunded for those who already paid said fees. No sponsorships have been secured. Several leads on End User Stories including a concrete one from a tech board rep that has materialized.

Tech Board Update:

Maxime Coquelin briefly reviewed all of recent DPDK releases and their corresponding release dates; Mr. St. Leger asked Mr. Coquelin about the transition from four releases a year to three anf if this is helpful for the community. Mr. Coquelin didn’t yet have a definitive answer but agreed to add the subject to the September tech board meeting in Arcachon France at Userspace.

Tech Writer Updates: Mr. Southern indicated that we have received applications/interest from 8 promising candidates and will be shepherding them through the interview process.

There were no Community Lab or DTS WG updates presented at this meeting.

 

 

 

 

Aug 31
Love0

DPDK Governing Board Meeting Summary – July 12 2022

By Governing Board Minutes


Brief Summary of Governing Board Minutes from 7/12/22

Community Lab: Aaron Conole discussed key strides in critical areas such as HW upgrades, replacement of failed hardware, repair of Broadcom platform issues, and ongoing work on updated container definitions, even as the lab strives for improvements with OpenSSL crypto testing, and confronts challenges such as the need for new lab servers and self-service retesting, and the integration of FIPS testing. Aaron plans to reach out to vendors to request hardware refreshes and audit all hardware, tagging old equipment. Will report back to GB on any related budgetary requirements.

Tech Board Update: Hackathon will take place at Userspace on 9/6., and the tech writer hire process is underway. In light of Olivier Matz’s resignation, the TB is down to 10 members. The TB is also requesting backup servers from Linux Foundation, which Nathan is helping to facilitate.

DPDK Marketing: The website, CFP and registration are live for Userspace 2022, and the final event schedule will be published in the first week of August. A tech board and governing board meeting will be held on location on 9/6 and 9/8 respectively in France with both in person and remote options; TB and GB members have free admission. Sponsorship packages are available and Nathan will share with the community. 

Jill Lovato is soliciting End User Stories and should be contacted with any relevant material.

There were no DTS or Financial Updates at this meeting.

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