A meeting of the DPDK Governing Board Took Place on April 3, 2025 and covered the following agenda items:
- LF Antitrust/Attendance – Nathan Southern
- Board Chair Update – Tim O’Driscoll
- Financial update – Keesang Song
- Marketing Update – Ben Thomas
- Tech Board Update – Stephen Hemmingereve
- Tech Writer Update – Nandini Persad
- Events Update – Prague and Santa Clara – Nathan Southern
Chair Tim O’Driscoll began with a board chair update and indicated that most yearly member renewals are complete with only two still in process; discussions continue to take place with new member prospects. The project is in solid financial shape but is exploring ways to bring spending in line with revenue, including doing more community-run events in the years to come.
Treasurer Keesang Song echoed these financial observations. He reported that the DPDK 2025 budget is largely focused on community development (35%) and marketing (39%) activities. Other areas include Staff, Travel and Board (18%) and General/Administrative (9%).
Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas then reviewed current marketing plans, including the launch of a DPDK 15th anniversary campaign (2010-2025), the creation of a new blog piece collaboration with Edwin Verplanke titled “A Day in the Life of a Packet,” and the development of two separate project advocacy decks: one for corporate-backed developers and one targeted to universities, which will dovetail with the project’s interest in recruiting university students to help expand development.
Stephen Hemminger, the Tech Board representative to the Governing Board, then highlighted some of the ongoing process work done by DPDK, including expanded support for Microsoft Visual Studio compiler, the expansion of long-term Rust support for DPDK, and the addition of a recent static analysis tool that has successfully identified numerous bugs on the platform. Stephen also reported on the UNH Community Lab’s recent progress, which has been robust.
Stephen Hemminger then discussed the tech board’s desire to include Linux kernel uAPI header files into a dedicated directory of the DPDK repository; the goals include improving build coverage, reducing the complexity in the DPDK libraries (#ifdef KERNEL_FEATURE …), fixing the issue of having the build system disabling features that are supported by the deployed hosts, etc. This will require a license exception. Several of the Board members present, however, expressed a desire to abstain from voting on this exception until specific counsel (and corresponding language) regarding it have been received from Linux Foundation Legal. A vote will then be taken via email.
Tech writer Nandini Persad then surveyed some of the recent highlights of her work, including refining the Flow Offload section of Programmer’s Guide by moving 149 descriptions of item types/functions/constants to the API docs, reviewing sections 1-8 of the Contributor’s Guidelines, and uploading all Known Issues and limitations from the release notes into Bugzilla.
The meeting concluded with a brief report by Nathan Southern on the Prague Summit, which will take place at the Hotel Grandior in the Czech Republic from May 8-9. This event has been completely finalized; registration is live online, and a venue, the Pivovar u Supa, has been reserved in Prague for the Summit’s evening reception on May 8. Planning for the Santa Clara Sumit (Sep. 17-18) is also underway; registration (on Cvent) and the CFP (on Sessionize) will both open on May 1. The Santa Clara event will take place at the Intel corporate headquarters on Mission Blvd. in Santa Clara, California.
