DPDK Tech Board meeting minutes 27-May-2026

[Konstantin Ananyev]

Members Attending
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Aaron Conole
Bruce Richardson
Jerin Jacob Kollanukkaran
Kevin Traynor
Konstantin Ananyev (chair)
Maxime Coquelin
Morten Brørup
Stephen Hemminger
Thomas Monjalon

NOTE
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The Technical Board meetings take place every second Wednesday at 3 pm UTC.
Meetings are public, and DPDK community members are welcome to attend.
Agenda and previous minutes:
http://core.dpdk.org/techboard/minutes
The next meeting will follow the regular schedule.

1. DPDK Vulnerability Management - request for more engineers (Maxime, Thomas)
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    - 15 unprocessed CVEs in the backlog
    - One of the current DPDK security maintainers is not active any more
    - DPDK security group needs more people to coupe with existing and new CVEs  
      - Options considered:
        - Intel and Marvell will poke for some internal resources
        - Try to reach universities that specialize in that topic
        - Hire research interns for that role:
           AR to current TB representative in the DPDK GB:
           Bring up that problem to DPDK GB attention and request for funding             

2. Excessive usage of __rte_always_inline (Stephen)
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The ``__rte_always_inline`` attribute forces the compiler to inline a function regardless of its size or call-graph heuristics.
Excessive usage of forced inlining can hurt performance by inflating function bodies, increasing register pressure,
and overriding profile-guided optimization.
In most cases preferred way would be plain ``inline`` (or no annotation at all for static functions) and let the compiler decide.
Modern compilers at ``-O2`` make good inlining decisions for small ``static inline`` functions.
New usages of ``__rte_always_inline`` have to be properly justified for the submitter od the patch.
Stephen to submit new patch for DPDK coding guideless to address that matter:
https://patchwork.dpdk.org/project/dpdk/patch/20260601172104.311909-1-stephen@networkplumber.org/