Governing Board Minutes

The second meeting of the DPDK Governing Board for 2025 took place on February 13, with 9 of 11 board members present.

Three major items were covered in this session:

1) The appointment of new leadership for the project in 2025/the outcome of the recent leadership election

2) The arrival of a new NXP representative on the DPDK board

3) Status updates on the 2025 Bay Area Summit

New Project Leadership

The 2025 DPDK Leadership Election recently concluded with three unopposed nominees for the board – one for each available role. Tim O’Driscoll of Intel is our new Chair, Ian Jolliffe of Red Hat is our new vice chair, and Keesang Song of AMD is our new treasurer.

The board acknowledged the longstanding contributions of former chair Rashid Khan (Red Hat) and vice chair/treasurer Robin Giller (Intel) for over two years of strong project leadership.

New NXP Representative

Suchit Lepcha recently replaced Rajan Gupta as the Governing Board representative of Silver member NXP. Suchit introduced himself to the board and touched on his background and qualifications.

2025 Bay Summit Update

Following the Governing Board’s January 23rd approval of requisite funds for a September 2025 Bay Area event, Senior Project Coordinator Nathan Southern began to work with summit host Intel to facilitate this conference. It will take place from September 17-18, 2025 on Intel’s Santa Clara campus.

Registration is being set up on RegFox and is tentatively slated to open, along with a Call for Papers, around May 1. Internal planning meetings have been set up with the Intel team; these will begin on a monthly basis, in March, and will increase in frequency starting in May.

The Bay Area Summit will be a community-run, member hosted event. unlike the DPDK Prague Summit in May, it is not being organized or launched the Linux Foundation Events Management Services team. Publicity will begin later in the year to avoid interference with marketing of the Prague Summit.

As in the case of prior project summits, the DPDK Governing Board has voted to approve the reimbursement of select expenses, including food, travel and lodging, for DPDK Tech Board and Governing Board members.

The first 2025 meeting of the DPDK Governing Board took place on January 23. 

The board covered three major items in this session: a September 2025 event in Santa Clara, CA; the departure of two longstanding board members + the arrival of their replacements; and 2025 leadership elections.

Santa Clara Event

DPDK leadership formally proposed and then voted to approve a second 2025 event, following the planned DPDK Prague Summit that will be held May 8-9.  

The new event is a community-driven conference in the Bay Area on Thu., September 18 – Fri., September 19th, to be held at board member Intel’s campus in Santa Clara. Intel generously offered a free meeting space, and assistance with AV, food, and security, among other amenities. Prospective speakers will be encouraged to submit to a CFP, per a traditional summit, and those selected will lead a series of talks. Food and beverages will be offered to attendees.

The community and member-driven nature of the fall 2025 event (including a free conference space) creates a significant cost savings for the project, although it will require additional PM coordination on the back end.

All nine board members who were present reviewed the cost estimates and high-level budget, and unanimously greenlit this proposal. Planning for the Santa Clara conference will begin immediately.

This is the first of two proposed community-driven events in the near future; another board member has informally suggested the use of their own member campus for fall 2026, though this is still in the discussion phase.

Departure/Replacement of Current DPDK Board Members

During the weeks ahead, two board members are stepping down from the DPDK project: Rashid Khan is being replaced by Ian Jolliffe as the Red Hat representative , and Robin Giller is being replaced by Tim O’Driscoll as the Intel representative.

Election of 2025 DPDK Leadership

On a related note: Mr. Khan’s longtime role as DPDK Governing Board Chair and Mr. Giller’s longstanding tenure in two roles – DPDK Governing Board Vice Chair and Treasurer – means that three leadership roles are now vacant: Chair, Vice Chair, and Treasurer. The Governing Board agreed to do one week of nominations followed by one week of voting, and the election began confidentially, following the meeting, with the collection of nominations via email and online forms. Election winners will be disclosed on the website when the election wraps.

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.

Montreal Summit  – Rashid Khan and Evi Harmon

This meeting began with a high-level overview of the DPDK North American Summit in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which will be held from September 23-25 at the William Gray Hotel. 

The Summit will be preceded by two private working meetings/dinners – one with the Tech Board and one with the Governing Board – that prioritize agenda-setting for 2025.  Everyone who has not yet registered is encouraged to do so, and can do so here, while venue information for The William Gray Hotel (site of the conference) can be found here.  The room block rate for the Gray Hotel ends September 3rd.

The Summit will also include a reception on the evening of September 24th that is open to the public, details to be announced.

Ms. Harmon noted that there are 23 speaker sessions scheduled, plus a Q&A with the Governing Board and Technical board, plus workshops with topics to be announced. The agenda can be accessed here.  A reception will take place following the first day of the summit.

The event will be both live streamed on youtube and edited/reposted after the event.

Membership – Rashid Khan

DPDK has had 100% corporate member retention for the third straight year in a row and the focus will soon shift to renewals for 2025 memberships and related/supporting outreach. 

UNH Community Lab Update – Patrick Robb

The following recent developments were highlighted, involving the University of New Hampshire Community Lab:

1. The new x86 servers have been received, and are set up and provisioned.  A while back Mr. Robb emailed the Governing Board and Tech Board to let them know which PCI cards would be moved over to the new servers. They  have moved over some cards from the older servers and are running performance tests and sharing feedback with vendor reps. So far the performance results have been positive and aligns closely with what vendors have been posting on DPDK.org and the performance reports.

2. The lab is continuing to develop DTS test suites at a rate which should result in broad eth_dev coverage this year – and may go beyond the requests of the initial SOW.

3. Based on community feedback, the lab has made various Quality of Life improvements for the CI lab and their results reporting, including querying/caching updates for the  lab.dpdk.org dashboard (speeding it up the dashboard), updates for their test report reporting policies to make this more reliable, to start using the ‘pending’ label on patchwork. 

4. The functionality has been added where patchwork can actually track the dependencies between patches – something Thomas has encouraged as lead maintainer. This work is ongoing – spearheaded by Adam over at the Team Gerrit UNH – and is close to being finished; it should be present in the next patchwork release.

Marketing Update – Ben Thomas 

Mr. Thomas will be doing live video spots with Governing and Tech Board members at the Montreal Summit. In addition to this, he is doing the following content schedule in connection with the summit:

      1. Photos on the ground at event

      2. UNH Lab in-person visit photos and interviews for board members and supporting staff

      3. Video showreel creation from interviews for website and Golden deck

      4. Post event highlights and videos – built around the actual speaker presentations.

·       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. 

This board meeting featured: a financial update & membership updates by Robin Giller of Intel, DPDK Board Vice Chair and Treasurer; 2024 Summit updates for APAC (Bangkok) and North America (Montreal) by Evi Harmon, Events Coordinator of the Linux Foundation; tech stack updates on DPDK’s expansion, by Thomas Monjalon of Nvidia, Lead Maintainer of DPDK; and February 2024 Marketing Update and Vote  by Ben Thomas, Marketing Coordinator of The Linux Foundation.

Robin Giller began the meeting with financial updates. He noted that all  membership renewals have been paid for 2024, which will bring the project to 100% renewals for the third straight fiscal year in a row. The project’s financial posture is healthy, and is projected to remain so through the end of 2024. Key planned expenditures for this year include the DPDK Asian Summit in Bangkok (July 2024); the DPDK North American Summit in Montreal (September 2024); the purchase of new servers for the UNH Community Lab; and the salary of the project’s tech writer, hired earlier this year. 

Evi Harmon then discussed the two DPDK events for 2024, including the Asian Summit, slated for Bangkok, Thailand from Jul. 8-9; availability has been cleared at a Bangkok Hotel and the contract is being finalized and signed this week; more details are forthcoming. Registration will be $20 for in person and virtual; all of the sessions will be recorded and will go on youtube after the event. There will be a reception on July 8th. Swag will include t-shirts and stickers. The event’s website and CFP will go live during the weeks ahead, and publicity has already begun.

The DPDK Summit North America will take place in Montreal from Sep. 24-25, 2024; availability of two hotels has been confirmed but neither has been locked in. Today’s meeting identified the hotel of choice and gave Ms. Harmon permission to lock it in. A contract will be finalized very shortly and more details are forthcoming. A website, publicity and a CFP will follow. 

Thomas Monjalon then discussed DPDK’s planned evolution in three areas: hyperscaling/cloud, security, and AI, and laid out strategies for expansion in all three sectors. 

The meeting wrapped with a summary of marketing accomplishments by coordinator Ben Thomas, who tied the Governing Board’s fiscal allocations for marketing/publicity in 2023 and its accompanying paid promotion budget to a dramatically expanded presence online and an upsurge in impressions and clicks. Mr. Thomas described organic upward trends in DPDK Downloads, website traffic, social media engagement, YouTube views, and engagement rates in our owned media. This positive momentum has persisted into Q124, particularly with notable growth in social media metrics. Q124 has demonstrated overall positive momentum, with PR mentions (earned media) rebounding from Q3-Q4 2023. Notably, February saw double the average number of mentions. The meeting concluded with Mr. Thomas’s request of the Governing Board for another paid marketing allocation from the budget for 2024, which received unanimous approval from all present.

This board meeting featured: a UNH Community Lab update from Patrick Robb of the University of New Hampshire, a 2024 Events update from Events Coordinator Evi Harmon of The Linux Foundation, a marketing update from Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas of The Linux Foundation, an outreach update from Sr. Project Coordinator Nathan Southern of the Linux Foundation, and a financial overview/ membership renewal update from Vice Chair/Treasurer Robin Giller, of Intel. 

Patrick Robb began by outlining recent Community Lab news. The Lab added a Windows Server 2022 VM utilizing the MSVC Preview compiler for build testing, and stood up the TS-Factory Ethernet Device testing framework, extending ethdev testing coverage on lab hardware. It also completed a NIC hardware refresh. It also recently hired one freelance part time DTS developer and is in the process of interviewing another.  The Community Lab is also exploring the option of purchasing new servers to augment its capabilities. 

As a result of current limitations, the Lab may look to the Governing Board to support the purchase of new servers in the near future. The lab currently has a very heterogeneous set of server brands, which increases operational overhead, but  limits its ability to automate system monitoring, etc. Making the Lab environment more homogeneous would have  key benefits. If new servers can be obtained for the Community Lab, it will streamline the onboarding of new NICs in the future, which may have some requirements not met by the present server inventory. 

Mr. Robb and Aaron Conole plan to present a concrete server update proposal to the DPDK Governing Board in the near future. Mr. Conole noted that he recently did a Community Lab inventory, and one of his chief concerns is making sure that the quality of the performance testing is on par with the best capability that can be provided.

Evi Harmon then provided an update on 2024 DPDK events. She has, per a Board prompt, been exploring options on behalf of the project for two 2024 events – one in North America (likely either Mexico or Montreal, QC) and an APAC one in either Bangkok, Thailand or Beijing, China. However, Mexico has not been responsive to venue requests. 

Seven Montreal venues responded to the Event Team’s inquiries, vs. two in Beijing and 7 in Bangkok. For Montreal, available dates include: the week of Aug 6, Aug 13, Aug 20, Aug 27, Sept 4, Sept 10 and Sept 24. In regard to the APAC event: this is being pursued as a two-day, one-track event for up to 75 attendees, without a reception but AM/PM breaks and lunch. For Bangkok and Beijing, available dates include: week of Sept 4, Sept 10, Sept 24, Oct 15, Oct 22 and Oct 29.

Ms. Harmon plans to continue to source venues for all three cities and obtain firmer costs, and a subsequent meeting will be set up with leadership during the next few weeks to make a firm decision between one of the two aforementioned APAC locations. 

Ben Thomas updated  DPDK marketing effort for 2024 is off to a strong start, between the meetings that have been held, the content Mr. Thomas is developing, and his own increased familiarity with the tech stack in general, as well as the community. There are many user stories and developer spotlights in the pipeline. Mr. Thomas has rebranded the DPDK newsletter, and he is tracking all of the stats on the created content. Mr. Thomas foresees the quality improving further, as he becomes better acquainted with the tech itself and the community at large.

Mr. Thomas also took some 2023 benchmarks from the content that has been created and the social media channels, newsletter, etc., and built on those targets to establish 2024 benchmarks. Currently, he is measuring the impact of the content and marketing activities. Mr. Thomas displayed the uptick in traffic to the DPDK website since he onboarded. The focus is on owned instead of earned media, but is also doing earned 3rd party PR to help drive traffic.

Nathan Southern and Robin Giller reported that all members but one have either paid their renewals for 2024 or have a payment in process. None to date have declined a renewal. Fiscally, the project remains on strong footing.  

Finally, Mr. Southern reported back on DPDK’s request of year-over-year interest collection on its standing surpluses, and noted that the Linux Foundation Board of Directors has approved this request for all projects. A summary of exact figures is forthcoming to the board. Mr. Southern will forward the Linux Foundation’s Investment Policy Statement to the DPDK Governing Board when it becomes available. 

The chief emphases of this meeting were primarily twofold:  1) To discuss deliverables for Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas’s 2024 agenda; 2) To begin event planning for two 2024 events, one in Asia and one in Europe or North America.

Marketing Discussion:

The board previously doubled the number of hours to which Mr. Thomas has committed and increased the spend in tandem. Mr. Thomas discussed the planned expansion of his platform over the next 12 months. At the heart of the 2024 strategy is an expansion of created content: demand generation – i.e., more webinars, blogs, user stories. These have been broken down into monthly deliverables, website maintenance, content management, social media  mgmt, meetings with maintainers, video content/editing, newsletter, end user stories, PR network monitoring/scraping, and monthly analytics reported to the board. The newly relaunched Outreach/Marketing team, which meets once a month, will help drive and shape these efforts.

Event Discussion:

After extended discussion, the board agreed to rotate its main Summit event from year to year between Europe and North America, to accommodate west coast contributors/board members and European ones equally. The 2024 Summit will be held in North America. The board agreed to pursue either Mexico (city to be determined) or Montreal for the North American event (mid-Q3). 

For the 2024 APAC DPDK event, the board is weighing either Beijing or Bangkok as possible locations. Evi Harmon, Events Coordinator for the project through The Linux Foundation, agreed to source venues for Mexico City, Cancun/Riviera Maya, Montreal, Beijing and Bangkok, and return to the Governing Board with more detailed information for venues in all of the aforementioned cities.

The DPDK Governing Board met for a special session on December 7, 2023, to review and vote on two key elective items for 2024, atop a basic table stakes budget that was unanimously approved in a November 2023 session. 

These items are as follows.

-Doubling Linux Foundation Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas’s monthly commitment to roughly 60 hours per month from his current commitment of 30 hours per month. Mr. Thomas’s stated high level deliverables for 2024 include but are not limited to: improving performance and shareability on the website; increasing the type and frequency of content for social media and user stories; boosting the community reach and engagement of video content; improving the timing and content of email communications; expanding blog content and collateral; and boosting strategic PR outreach.

-Hiring two part-time undergraduates from the University of New Hampshire to work in the Community Laboratory. These students will be further developing the DPDK Testing Suite (DTS), used to more effectively and expediently vet code submissions.

Of the 9 Governing Board members present for this session, all voted unanimously to approve each proposed measure as an addendum to the table stakes budget.

Tech Board Updates
The 23.07 release of DPDK is in the works, and stabilization work is underway to prep for a July release. Release notes link up has occurred. The API freeze happened along with the C1 on the week of June 5th, and the PMD feature freeze is anticipated for June 21. Extensive work is also underway to clear up a large backlog of patches. Finally, there has been extensive internal discussion about when and how to break ABI and API; policy is already in place for both, but there has been internal discussion about how the community would like to see things change in this area.

Community Lab Updates
A number of patch series have been submitted by UNH to the DPDK CI public repository and are being reviewed for formatting and maintenance aesthetics. Once that review is done, merges will take place. These are the final setups as deployed in the lab, and the lab is running with them. This has been submitted to the CI, and they will merge this before the end of June, assuming that everything looks satisfactory. There is additional development work happening with respect to DTS; the target is to get these in as part of the 23.07 release. Following this release, the lab will start automatically testing with DTS. The upstream improvements that go into DTS upstream will be automatically deployed in the lab. There has also been additional change with respect to distros being maintained in the lab. Fedora 35-36 are end of life, so the lab has moved on to Fedora 37-38. And finally, the lab is working on hardening up some of its reporting.

Events Summary
DPDK Summit 2023 is planned for September 12-13 in Dublin Ireland; the CFP is live and accepting proposals, and registrations are underway. There was brief discussion about the possibility of adding an additional on-site DPDK event for either late September 2023 or November or December 2023, but this is only a matter of discussion. This matter is still under review.

Finance Updates
There have not been significant changes in this area. The project is in a healthy financial place, with a decent surplus, and putting available monies toward additional investments that are being used to promote the project and grow the community.

Marcomms Updates
As DPDK’s new marketing coordinator, Ben Thomas of Linux Foundation has been strategically increasing the project’s presence with a multi-tiered approach that includes: publishing the monthly newsletter (on the DPDK website with its own tab), ramping up social media, developing and publishing multiple end user stories with several ready for publication and others soon to be, updating DPDK’s summit branding, and reviewing all channel analytics and responding accordingly.