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The DPDK Governing Board met on Zoom on April 25th for a high-level monthly review of different aspects of the project.

Vice Chair Ian Jolliffe (Red Hat) kicked off the meeting by discussing the leadership team’s progress on reaching out to potential new membership opportunities for contributors to the community, with occasional follow ups as are warranted. Mr. Jolliffe also noted that the project will soon hold a summit in Prague from May 8-9; registration now totals 128. The event promises to be an exciting opportunity for the project, in terms of visibility and community building.

Mr. Jolliffe also noted that extensive promotions are underway for the Bay Area Summit in Santa Clara from September 17-18; registration and the CFP open May 1.

Mr. Jolliffe concluded by noting that the Tech Board and the Governing Board unanimously passed a resolution to approve Linux Kernel uAPI headers licensed under GPLv2 so that that voting has passed, and is now that exception is now in our in the project’s Github.

Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas then provided a brief survey of marketing campaigns. He noted that the  “last chance to register” campaign for Prague is underway and will be wrapping up in a week; registration will stay open until the conference launches on May 9. He also stated that he will begin a publicity rollout for the September Bay Area Summit, but wants to  wait until just after Prague kicks off to avoid interference of simultaneous publicity for the two events.

In addition to this, Mr. Thomas recently pulled together a university deck designed to recruit student developers., sped up the DPDK website considerably and switched it to a new server, and is working on a new campaign for DPDK as a collaboration with Edwin Verplanke of Nvidia, “A Day in the Life of a Packet.” Mr. Thomas will launch a 15th Anniversary Campaign for DPDK this fall.

Tech Board rep to the Governing Board Stephen Hemminger then spoke. Mr. Hemminger recapped briefly on the Linux Kernel License exception, which was done to enable building of things like VirtIO on older systems. In addition to this – and more broadly – DPDK has been updating which systems it builds, tests and runs on like the new Fedora (which runs on GCC 15), while dropping enterprise distros that are no longer in maintenance from being tested. The consensus is that if someone wants to run the new DPDK on something so old that it is no longer maintained, they are on their own.

Next, Patrick Robb of the University of New Hampshire provided an update on the Community Lab. Among other points, Mr. Robb stated that the lab just added a new Intel QAT 4xxx series crypto device, which is running throughput and latency tests for the QAT PMD. Mr. Robb also stated that on the DTS end, new testsuites have been merged including test_stats_checks, test_and port_control. The Lab Team has been working with an AWS engineer towards setting up an AWS CI Testing lab, which went live on April 24, running build and unit tests on their x86_64 and ARM Graviton environments.

Senior Program Coordinator Nathan Southern briefly wrapped up the meeting with some high-level updates on the Prague and Bay Area (Santa Clara) 2025 Summits.

A meeting of the DPDK Governing Board Took Place on April 3, 2025 and covered the following agenda items:

• LF Antitrust/Attendance – Nathan Southern
• Board Chair Update – Tim O’Driscoll
• Financial update – Keesang Song
• Marketing Update – Ben Thomas
• Tech Board Update – Stephen Hemmingereve
• Tech Writer Update – Nandini Persad
• Events Update – Prague and Santa Clara – Nathan Southern

Chair Tim O’Driscoll began with a board chair update and indicated that most yearly member renewals are complete with only two still in process; discussions continue to take place with new member prospects. The project is in solid financial shape but is exploring ways to bring spending in line with revenue, including doing more community-run events in the years to come.

Treasurer Keesang Song echoed these financial observations. He reported that the DPDK 2025 budget is largely focused on community development (35%) and marketing (39%) activities. Other areas include Staff, Travel and Board (18%) and General/Administrative (9%).

Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas then reviewed current marketing plans, including the launch of a DPDK 15th anniversary campaign (2010-2025), the creation of a new blog piece collaboration with Edwin Verplanke titled “A Day in the Life of a Packet,” and the development of two separate project advocacy decks: one for corporate-backed developers and one targeted to universities, which will dovetail with the project’s interest in recruiting university students to help expand development.

Stephen Hemminger, the Tech Board representative to the Governing Board, then highlighted some of the ongoing process work done by DPDK, including expanded support for Microsoft Visual Studio compiler, the expansion of long-term Rust support for DPDK, and the addition of a recent static analysis tool that has successfully identified numerous bugs on the platform. Stephen also reported on the UNH Community Lab’s recent progress, which has been robust.

Stephen Hemminger then discussed the tech board’s desire to include Linux kernel uAPI header files into a dedicated directory of the DPDK repository; the goals include improving build coverage, reducing the complexity in the DPDK libraries (#ifdef KERNEL_FEATURE …), fixing the issue of having the build system disabling features that are supported by the deployed hosts, etc. This will require a license exception. Several of the Board members present, however, expressed a desire to abstain from voting on this exception until specific counsel (and corresponding language) regarding it have been received from Linux Foundation Legal. A vote will then be taken via email.

Tech writer Nandini Persad then surveyed some of the recent highlights of her work, including refining the Flow Offload section of Programmer’s Guide by moving 149 descriptions of item types/functions/constants to the API docs, reviewing sections 1-8 of the Contributor’s Guidelines, and uploading all Known Issues and limitations from the release notes into Bugzilla. 

The meeting concluded with a brief report by Nathan Southern on the Prague Summit, which will take place at the Hotel Grandior in the Czech Republic from May 8-9. This event has been completely finalized; registration is live online, and a venue, the Pivovar u Supa, has been reserved in Prague for the Summit’s evening reception on May 8. Planning for the Santa Clara Sumit (Sep. 17-18) is also underway; registration (on Cvent) and the CFP (on Sessionize) will both open on May 1. The Santa Clara event will take place at the Intel corporate headquarters on Mission Blvd. in Santa Clara, California.