[dpdk-dev] DPDK techboard minutes @18/12/2019

[Luca Boccassi]

On Fri, 2019-12-20 at 16:33 +0000, Ananyev, Konstantin wrote:
> Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2019-12-18
> 
> Members Attending
> -----------------
> -Bruce
> -Ferruh
> -Hemant
> -Honnappa
> -Jerin
> -Kevin  
> -Konstantin (Chair)
> -Maxime
> -Olivier
> -Stephen
> -Thomas
> 
> NOTE: The technical board meetings every second Wednesday on IRC
> channel  #dpdk-board, at 3pm UTC. Meetings are public and DPDK
> community
> members are welcome to attend.
> 
> NOTE: Next meeting will be on Wednesday 2020-01-15 @3pm UTC, and will
> be
> chaired by Maxime Coquelin
> 
> 1) drivers/vdpa introduction discussion.
> Currently, at dpdk.org we have only IFC vDPA driver available
> (located in drivers/net),
> but more drivers are arriving (Mellanox, Virtio vDPA in v20.02).
> Might be some others are expected in later releases.
> Mellanox proposal is to introduce a new vDPA subsystem
> (drivers/vdpa),
> and move code common to both net and vdpa PMDs to the drivers/common
> directory.
> drivers/net/ifc will be moved entirely into drivers/vdpa/ifc
> While it seems to provide better code layout for drivers in long run,
> in short term it probably would need significant code refactoring for
> both mlx and virtio PMDs,
> plus can cause some difficulties for stable release maintainers.
> 
> AR to Maxime (virtio) and Matan (mlx) to estimate how big code
> refactoring will be required for such move.
> AR to stable release maintainers (Kevin and Luca) to estimate impact
> on stable releases.
> Decision at next TB meeting based on provided estimations/feedback.

Hi,

At a glance, the impact will be more time consuming backports, as fewer
patches will "cleanly" backport and require manual work, which will
lead to fewer patches being integrated directly by ourselves. Are the
PMDs devs/maintainers willing/available to do extra work to help
backporting fixes?

-- 
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi