Minutes of Technical Board Meeting, 2022-06-01

[fengchengwen]

On 2022/6/9 9:31, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 08:41:35 +0800
> fengchengwen <fengchengwen at huawei.com> wrote:
> 
>> [snip]
>>
>>>
>>> 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  
>>
>> We still use KNI in some business scenarios, and we want to maintain it in this case.
> 
> 
> Why?

The KNI module can be used in following scenarios: when the PF is taken over by the DPDK,
some traffic needs to be transmitted through the kernel protocol stack, we did have this
application scenario.

If do not proactively maintain the KNI, security risks may occur. and this's our starting point.

> 
>>
>> I recommend Huisong Li (lihuisong at huawei.com) as the new maintainer of the KNI.
>>
>> He has been involved in the community for several years and submitted some
>> bugfix patches of KNI.
> 
> KNI has several unfixable architectural issues.

Could you show detail on this ?

> It would never pass a full upstream kernel review.
> 
> I hope you realize the security impacts of this.

Is there another option to act like KNI role ?

> 
> .
>