Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2022-06-01

[Olivier Matz]

Members Attending
=================

9/11
- Aaron
- Bruce
- Hemant
- Jerin
- Kevin
- Maxime
- Olivier (chair)
- Stephen
- Thomas

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 2021-June-15 @3pm UTC, and will
be chaired by Stephen.

Agenda items
============

1) Update on the tech writer hire
---------------------------------

We are in the process of recruiting a tech writer to enhance DPDK
documentation.

The work group is composed of Nathan, Bruce, Stephen, Thomas.

- 5 reasonnable candidates among 17 applicants
- the list of tasks is defined, it has been estimated to ~250h
- the work should be spread over ~6 months to give enough time
  to the community for feedback
- after some time, if the community is satisfied, the writer can
  suggest new enhancements, reworks, or estimation updates
- in case the community is not satisfied, the contract could end
  before the end of the tasks

2) Discussions about alternatives to bug bounty to find bugs
------------------------------------------------------------

These three ideas were mentionned:

- static analysis tools
- fuzz testing
- adding more tests to CI

Projects from Google Project Zero were also mentionned:
https://github.com/orgs/googleprojectzero/repositories

3) Reminder about API/ABI stability
-----------------------------------

Recently, the vector keyword was removed from rte_altivec.h:
http://git.dpdk.org/dpdk/commit/?id=64fcadeac0f

Since it is a minor (accepted) API breakage, it is the opportunity
to do a reminder about the ABI/API process:

- API breakages are announced and can happen in minor versions
- ABI breakages are announced and can only happen in LTS releases

4) Removal of KNI
-----------------

There is no more maintainer for KNI.

A progressive removal proposal was made:
- add a message at runtime and/or compilation to announce deprecation
- remove KNI example after 22.11
- remove lib + kmod from main repo for 23.11

Bruce recently submitted a doc patchset to explain how to replace
it by virtio-user:
https://patchwork.dpdk.org/project/dpdk/list/?series=23218

The status of pending patches is not obvious. Until now, it was not
announced that new patches won't be integrated. Thomas will open the
discussion.