Tech Board Meeting Minutes - Sept. 23, 2024

[Aaron Conole <aconole@redhat.com>]

Attendees
---------
Aaron Conole
Bruce Richardson
David Marchand
Hemant Agrawal
Honnappa Nagarahalli
Kevin Traynor
Konstantin Ananyev
Maxime Coquelin
Morten Brorup
Robin Jarry
Stephen Hemminger
Thomas Monjalon


Notes
-----

The Tech Board met at a f2f session in Montreal, prior to the DPDK
Summit.  This meeting went much longer than a typical Tech Board
meeting.


Agenda
------
* Prep. for the summit
  ** Make sure people helping to monitor live stream know what they are
     doing
  ** Discussion about board q&a
  ** Discussion about workshops
     ** Will need people to help do leading at the workshop sessions

* Code challenge
  ** Idea: identify and promote tools to help detect issues early
  *** Tech board needs to give some guidance for this effort, since it
      isn't well known how to move forward.
  *** Does it have some CI component?  Can't just turn it on unless
      everything is passing, otherwise it will put expected failures.
  ** Idea: offer some rewards for these efforts
  *** What kinds of rewards to offer?
  ** Idea: can we also hire someone?

* Events discussion
  ** Techboard doesn't have much transparency on how the decision for
     venue, location, etc. is chosen.
  *** Ex: reasoning for venues and locations isn't well known
  *** Ex: Montreal had difficult visa process which resulted in some
          missed in-person attendance.
  ** Techboard would like to be able to give some input on the process
  *** Ex: hotels for the events have been costly
  ** We would like some of the maintainers to also be sponsored for
     attendance:
  *** David Marchand
  *** Akhil Goyal
  *** Ferruh Yigit
  ** Remote / hybrid speaking is going to have to be a way of life.  We
     should reconsider the remote spoeaker statuses.  We needed to
     scramble at the last minute to accommodate remote speakers.
  *** We also want to continue to give preference to in-person.
  ** Awards, gifts, etc.
  *** We used to give awards for different areas, and we would like to
      return to doing that.
  *** We want to give speaker gifts, if possible.
  *** Maybe also do some recognition
  **** Thomas to do slides for 'hall of fame' kind of recognition to
       contributors.

* Marketing discussion
  ** We aren't sure what the marketing goals are
  ** We feel that the marketing for the events was quite good
  ** Maybe we can have a session with marketing to understand
     what the other goals of marketing are.
  ** Is there a way to have marketing show the value of investing in
     DPDK to the users (ie: rather than just taking DPDK code and
     disappearing)?
  ** Reminder to interview with Ben during the conference

* Testing
  ** Intel lab having issues
  *** Need to sync with John McNamara and others about the system
  *** Seems that the Intel CI is in a barely maintained state.
  **** Ex: Testing old OSes, but not newer ones, etc.
  *** Bruce will send a message.
  ** Ask for the lab to test grout
  *** Aaron to sync with Patrick about it
  ** DTS
  *** Basic testing for ethdev to complete by the end of this year
  *** What are we targeting next?
  **** Ex: maybe rte_flow?
  *** Need guides for how to run DTS.  Maybe youtube videos?
  **** Presentation at the conference might cover some of this.
  **** More should be done - blog posts, documentation, etc.
  ** Testing gaps we might have
  *** Kernel has Syzbot fuzzer that just randomly hits APIs with
      garbage data to try and break things
  **** Can we have something like this in DPDK?
  **** Needs to be automated
  **** Do we need reference implementations on the behavior to test
       against?  At least if there aren't crashes that is good.
  **** How can we implement it?
  ** Can we add some kind of testing initiatives to the code challenge?

* Gov. Board
  ** We haven't gotten many meeting minutes
  ** We like the rotating tech board representative
  ** Gov. board gives initiative requests to tech board, but there
     aren't any kind of resources attached.
  *** would be good to have guarantees about spending time on these
      initiatives.
  ** Need more transparency where possible.

* Tech board
  ** Need to do more outreach for contributions.

* Feature / Bug tracking
  ** Make sure maintainers are on the bug database and getting mails
  *** They are supposed to be
  ** Kevin will push on bugs to come to resolution.
  ** Roadmap on the website is out of date
  *** Goal is to avoid duplicating work across organizations
  *** The roadmap shouldn't be used to have some feature requests, but
      should really show what someone is working on.
  *** Work needs to be tied to specific individuals.
  *** Need to remove any outdated details / rework the roadmap display.
  ** Feature requests
  *** are they useful?  who will work on them?
  *** Formal feature request process might give a false hope that
      someone will work on something.
  *** Better to be on the mailing list rather than bugzilla so that
      others can have involvement with discussions
      
* TOO MANY PATCHES
  ** We have a huge patch backlog
  *** Stephen can take another pass through the patchwork backlog, but
      the whole thing doesn't scale
  ** Need more reviewers
  *** Getting quality reviews where someone will use 'Reviewed-by' vs.
      merely acknowledging that some idea is reasonable to accept with
      'Acked-by'
  *** How to get more people motivated to review
  *** Reviews are a large burden right now on David and Thomas
      primarily.
  ** Can we auto-merge patches?
  *** Other communities do this, and merge if someone hasn't commented
      in a few days' time.
  *** If someone breaks code, then it will incentivize people to do more
      reviewing... maybe?
  ** Can we find another person to do the kind of maintenance that David
     and Thomas do?
  *** Plan is to use the maintainers meeting to discuss
  ** Ask Gov Board to ask their respective comanies for more reviewers

* Branches
  ** Maybe restart the short-term stable releases
  *** Difficult to see the value
  *** Already exists a way to get point releases, someone just needs to
      step up for those, but no one does

* Grout
  ** project aims to replicate CNF/VNF use cases

* discussion about where apps fit
  ** testpmd and apps naming don't seem right?

* Cloud initiative
  ** Amazon
  *** Wants to participate in CI
  ** Microsoft
  *** Discussions will start soon
  ** Who else to reach out to?
  *** Ali Baba?
  *** others?

* Security
  ** Status doc to be published
  ** Protocols we want to see?
  *** Wireguard?
  *** psp?

* AI
  ** Use as a tool in Patch Reviews?
  *** Aaron has some code that kindof does it
  *** Needs robust training data
  *** Costly to integrate
  ** Do we need more publicity of mldev?