NOTE: The technical board meetings are on 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 2023-02-08 @3pm UTC, and will be chaired by Hemant. Agenda Items ============ New Library Acceptance ----------------------- - TB agreed the need for a documented process for accepting new libraries into DPDK - Doing a proper RFC and then full patchsets is significant work and getting early approval-in-principle that a library is suitable for DPDK will help avoid wasted effort if it is not suitable - As part of the process, our guidelines should document what needs to be covered in the initial library RFC submission - any licensing constraints - justification for adding to DPDK - any other implementations of the same functionality in other libs/products and how this version differs. - Jerin has already made an initial proposal on the mailing list - Action: Jerin to propose an official process/policy by way of documentation patch for DPDK contributing guide. - to be discussed on-list - voted on by Tech-Board at next meeting Review of Proposed Libraries for DPDK 23.03 -------------------------------------------- PDCP Library - library is solving a single problem - library offers complete support for full or partial protocol offload - designed in the same way as existing IPSec library in DPDK - Library approved in principle for inclusion in DPDK MLDev Library - library for inference functionality only - model creation is out of scope for library - for use cases of offloading raw packets, or lightly processed packets to inference engine - Library approved in principle for inclusion in DPDK Memarea Library - Jerin provided best-effort explanation of library purpose and functionality - library for giving blocks of memory for general DPDK use - memory may be of different types and not necessarily pinned or dma-capable - can request memory from certain specific registered ranges - Stephen H. to investigate similar functionality which is believed available in some malloc libraries, to see if we can learn from those whether this may fit in our existing malloc code. - felt that merging would reduce duplication, and avoid confusion about the number of memory allocation/free functions DPDK supports - concern expressed about perf of rte_malloc - library was felt to be providing a fast-path variable-size allocator for DPDK: - DPDK mempools provide existing fast-path allocator but for fixed-size blocks only - DPDK rte_malloc provides variable allocations, but is not for fast-path use - Decided to invite author in to a future techboard meeting to discuss further PMU Library - library to expose HW performance counters from various architectures - plans to link this in with DPDK trace functionality - TB ask to try and keep functionality in new library, rather than in EAL - concern about variance in both counters and methods of counting across architectures - felt this just needed to be covered in documentation - Library approved in principle for inclusion in DPDK Splitting EAL -------------- - Bruce reminded TB about patchset to extract logging functionality from EAL into separate library - also covered other (unsuccessful) attempts to extract other parts cleanly - Morten suggested looking to extract out per-architecture parts, or per-OS parts of EAL - Thomas suggested alternative approach of extracting the EAL init - higher level parts - of EAL rather than looking to extract out the low-level bits first. - More discussion to follow - few people actually looking into problem, so help needed. Conference ----------- - Question asked about planning for a conference or meetup for DPDK this year. - Thomas informed TB that there was a small marketing team looking at this, but nothing likely to be organised in early part of the year.