Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2021-06-02 ==============================================
NOTE: The technical board meetings every second Wednesday at https://meet.jit.si/DPDK at 3 pm UTC. Meetings are public, and DPDK community members are welcome to attend. NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2021-06-09 @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Thomas. 1/ CI infrastructure -------------------- The current CI infrastructure is failing. The root cause appears to be the upgrade by UNH IOL causing test failures. The test failures impact the patch approval process since patches marked as failing CI are normally not allowed. Proposal was to have another set of resources to test upgrade before deploying. 2/ ABI stability period ----------------------- When initially discussed the stability period was going to be two years, but in final compromise a trial period of one year was agreed to but the wording in documentation allows for longer periods. In the documentation (guides/contributing/abi_policy.rst) "Major ABI versions are declared no more frequently than yearly" The proposal is to go to two year period but there are some open concerns that need addressing: - several data structures and inline functions need to be hidden to reduce the exposed ABI. - many experimental features need to be moved to stable status. - deprecated functions and fields need to be removed. If 21.11 is going to have two year ABI window, then cleanups are needed. Related discussions: Should the scope of Long Term Stable (LTS) be expended? Right now, the scope is limited to bug fixes. Vendors and distro's using LTS would appreciate having new drivers (and PCI ids). What about backporting standalone new libraries to LTS? Conclusion: is that more discussion about requirements and risks are needed before expanding LTS. Indirect results of the current ABI policy has benefits. The ABI clamp has acted to reduce wild/unstable changes and causes better designs. Downside is that there is less of a trial window for changes, if a new feature requires ABI change it goes into the yearly release without getting longer period of review and testing. What kind of upcoming features need ABI breakage? Conclusion: Taskforce will be setup to make a more concrete recommendation. The taskforce will give status update in 2 weeks (next TAB) and recommend action for 21.11 in one month.
