[dpdk-dev] DPDK Windows Community call - 18 April 2019

[Ranjit Menon]

Attendees:
(Present)
Thomas (thomas at monjalon.net)
Harini (harini.ramakrishnan at microsoft.com)
Bruce (bruce.richardson at intel.com)
Cathal (cathal.ohare at intel.com)
Anand (anand.rawat at intel.com)
Pallavi (pallavi.kadam at intel.com)
Ranjit (ranjit.menon at intel.com)

Eilon  (eilong at mellanox.com)
Raslan (rasland at mellanox.com)
        (yohadt at mellanox.com)
Jeffrey (jeffrey.tippet at microsoft.com)
Omar (ocardona at microsoft.com)
Khoa (khot at microsoft.com)

New interested attendees added to meeting invite for next call:
Haseeb.Gani at cavium.com
shshaikh at marvell.com
nareshkumar.pbs at broadcom.com

Agenda:
------
Meeting for 1 hour as a place holder every 2 weeks.
Expect call to last 30-40 minutes or longer as needed.
Encourage other dpdk.org windows partners to join this call.
Minutes via public mailing list.
a. Current release
b. Improvements/Shared objectives - sync up on the bus/pci and general 
status
    - Mellanox agrees bus/pci port should be our next target
    - Intel has latest bus/pci updates available in windows draft repo
c. Any other business


Minutes:
-------
- Removing rte_panic() calls in EAL (and other libraries)
- Some functions that call rte_panic() are defined as 'void' return.
   - will need to modify these functions - which breaks ABI.
- If we're doing this it would require deprecation notice in 19.05.
- Group discussion on removal of rte panics void returns.
- Might need another definition for fatal error codes
   - Why? The application layer will assess whether something is fatal
   - Better to return what the error is and let the application take the 
decision on whether or not it’s a fatal error.
- Advice is to use current error codes that is close enough to the error 
seen.
- Use a matching a core id error – we should pass back an int-return and 
allow the app to decide what action to take.
- Thomas says Arnon Warshavsky (arnon at qwilt.com) was working on removing 
rte panics last year (eal: replace rte_panic instances to return an 
error value).
- Check the list of what APIs need to change and get the list out now to 
the community in 19.05.
- This woudl be a pre-announcement message to the mailing list – this is 
sent as a patch in 19.05, explaining what will be changed in which files.
- Offline discussion with Arnon: see mailing list for detail.

- What other changes do we need to do in EAL to make upstreaming easier?
  - Open source libraries to support common code (BSD licenses).
  - May need a better wrapper on Linux files to use for windows.
  - Some of them (eg: pthreads) not supported in windows
    - so we did macro substitutions to use Windows threads.
  - Wrappers could be used more widely.
    - Need to work out how to do this more widely.
- Please send your ideas for a solution to the mailing list to seek 
comments (RFC).
  - We need to identify the blockers we’re aware of at the moment
    - Perhaps, TSC is one.
- Send interesting topics for the community to work on.

- Is the bus/pci code available?
  - Ask is to move the bus/pci code over to the latest branch (intel).
- Intel/Microsoft currently working to tidy up the branches & names on 
windows draft repo.

- Any new code for the tree?
  - Microsoft is trying to add new code to existing UIO driver
  - This will be available on windows draft repo (18.08 branch)