Governing Board Minutes

This board meeting featured: a UNH Community Lab update from Patrick Robb of the University of New Hampshire, a 2024 Events update from Events Coordinator Evi Harmon of The Linux Foundation, a marketing update from Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas of The Linux Foundation, an outreach update from Sr. Project Coordinator Nathan Southern of the Linux Foundation, and a financial overview/ membership renewal update from Vice Chair/Treasurer Robin Giller, of Intel. 

Patrick Robb began by outlining recent Community Lab news. The Lab added a Windows Server 2022 VM utilizing the MSVC Preview compiler for build testing, and stood up the TS-Factory Ethernet Device testing framework, extending ethdev testing coverage on lab hardware. It also completed a NIC hardware refresh. It also recently hired one freelance part time DTS developer and is in the process of interviewing another.  The Community Lab is also exploring the option of purchasing new servers to augment its capabilities. 

As a result of current limitations, the Lab may look to the Governing Board to support the purchase of new servers in the near future. The lab currently has a very heterogeneous set of server brands, which increases operational overhead, but  limits its ability to automate system monitoring, etc. Making the Lab environment more homogeneous would have  key benefits. If new servers can be obtained for the Community Lab, it will streamline the onboarding of new NICs in the future, which may have some requirements not met by the present server inventory. 

Mr. Robb and Aaron Conole plan to present a concrete server update proposal to the DPDK Governing Board in the near future. Mr. Conole noted that he recently did a Community Lab inventory, and one of his chief concerns is making sure that the quality of the performance testing is on par with the best capability that can be provided.

Evi Harmon then provided an update on 2024 DPDK events. She has, per a Board prompt, been exploring options on behalf of the project for two 2024 events – one in North America (likely either Mexico or Montreal, QC) and an APAC one in either Bangkok, Thailand or Beijing, China. However, Mexico has not been responsive to venue requests. 

Seven Montreal venues responded to the Event Team’s inquiries, vs. two in Beijing and 7 in Bangkok. For Montreal, available dates include: the week of Aug 6, Aug 13, Aug 20, Aug 27, Sept 4, Sept 10 and Sept 24. In regard to the APAC event: this is being pursued as a two-day, one-track event for up to 75 attendees, without a reception but AM/PM breaks and lunch. For Bangkok and Beijing, available dates include: week of Sept 4, Sept 10, Sept 24, Oct 15, Oct 22 and Oct 29.

Ms. Harmon plans to continue to source venues for all three cities and obtain firmer costs, and a subsequent meeting will be set up with leadership during the next few weeks to make a firm decision between one of the two aforementioned APAC locations. 

Ben Thomas updated  DPDK marketing effort for 2024 is off to a strong start, between the meetings that have been held, the content Mr. Thomas is developing, and his own increased familiarity with the tech stack in general, as well as the community. There are many user stories and developer spotlights in the pipeline. Mr. Thomas has rebranded the DPDK newsletter, and he is tracking all of the stats on the created content. Mr. Thomas foresees the quality improving further, as he becomes better acquainted with the tech itself and the community at large.

Mr. Thomas also took some 2023 benchmarks from the content that has been created and the social media channels, newsletter, etc., and built on those targets to establish 2024 benchmarks. Currently, he is measuring the impact of the content and marketing activities. Mr. Thomas displayed the uptick in traffic to the DPDK website since he onboarded. The focus is on owned instead of earned media, but is also doing earned 3rd party PR to help drive traffic.

Nathan Southern and Robin Giller reported that all members but one have either paid their renewals for 2024 or have a payment in process. None to date have declined a renewal. Fiscally, the project remains on strong footing.  

Finally, Mr. Southern reported back on DPDK’s request of year-over-year interest collection on its standing surpluses, and noted that the Linux Foundation Board of Directors has approved this request for all projects. A summary of exact figures is forthcoming to the board. Mr. Southern will forward the Linux Foundation’s Investment Policy Statement to the DPDK Governing Board when it becomes available. 

The chief emphases of this meeting were primarily twofold:  1) To discuss deliverables for Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas’s 2024 agenda; 2) To begin event planning for two 2024 events, one in Asia and one in Europe or North America.

Marketing Discussion:

The board previously doubled the number of hours to which Mr. Thomas has committed and increased the spend in tandem. Mr. Thomas discussed the planned expansion of his platform over the next 12 months. At the heart of the 2024 strategy is an expansion of created content: demand generation – i.e., more webinars, blogs, user stories. These have been broken down into monthly deliverables, website maintenance, content management, social media  mgmt, meetings with maintainers, video content/editing, newsletter, end user stories, PR network monitoring/scraping, and monthly analytics reported to the board. The newly relaunched Outreach/Marketing team, which meets once a month, will help drive and shape these efforts.

Event Discussion:

After extended discussion, the board agreed to rotate its main Summit event from year to year between Europe and North America, to accommodate west coast contributors/board members and European ones equally. The 2024 Summit will be held in North America. The board agreed to pursue either Mexico (city to be determined) or Montreal for the North American event (mid-Q3). 

For the 2024 APAC DPDK event, the board is weighing either Beijing or Bangkok as possible locations. Evi Harmon, Events Coordinator for the project through The Linux Foundation, agreed to source venues for Mexico City, Cancun/Riviera Maya, Montreal, Beijing and Bangkok, and return to the Governing Board with more detailed information for venues in all of the aforementioned cities.

The DPDK Governing Board met for a special session on December 7, 2023, to review and vote on two key elective items for 2024, atop a basic table stakes budget that was unanimously approved in a November 2023 session. 

These items are as follows.

-Doubling Linux Foundation Marketing Coordinator Ben Thomas’s monthly commitment to roughly 60 hours per month from his current commitment of 30 hours per month. Mr. Thomas’s stated high level deliverables for 2024 include but are not limited to: improving performance and shareability on the website; increasing the type and frequency of content for social media and user stories; boosting the community reach and engagement of video content; improving the timing and content of email communications; expanding blog content and collateral; and boosting strategic PR outreach.

-Hiring two part-time undergraduates from the University of New Hampshire to work in the Community Laboratory. These students will be further developing the DPDK Testing Suite (DTS), used to more effectively and expediently vet code submissions.

Of the 9 Governing Board members present for this session, all voted unanimously to approve each proposed measure as an addendum to the table stakes budget.

Tech Board Updates
The 23.07 release of DPDK is in the works, and stabilization work is underway to prep for a July release. Release notes link up has occurred. The API freeze happened along with the C1 on the week of June 5th, and the PMD feature freeze is anticipated for June 21. Extensive work is also underway to clear up a large backlog of patches. Finally, there has been extensive internal discussion about when and how to break ABI and API; policy is already in place for both, but there has been internal discussion about how the community would like to see things change in this area.

Community Lab Updates
A number of patch series have been submitted by UNH to the DPDK CI public repository and are being reviewed for formatting and maintenance aesthetics. Once that review is done, merges will take place. These are the final setups as deployed in the lab, and the lab is running with them. This has been submitted to the CI, and they will merge this before the end of June, assuming that everything looks satisfactory. There is additional development work happening with respect to DTS; the target is to get these in as part of the 23.07 release. Following this release, the lab will start automatically testing with DTS. The upstream improvements that go into DTS upstream will be automatically deployed in the lab. There has also been additional change with respect to distros being maintained in the lab. Fedora 35-36 are end of life, so the lab has moved on to Fedora 37-38. And finally, the lab is working on hardening up some of its reporting.

Events Summary
DPDK Summit 2023 is planned for September 12-13 in Dublin Ireland; the CFP is live and accepting proposals, and registrations are underway. There was brief discussion about the possibility of adding an additional on-site DPDK event for either late September 2023 or November or December 2023, but this is only a matter of discussion. This matter is still under review.

Finance Updates
There have not been significant changes in this area. The project is in a healthy financial place, with a decent surplus, and putting available monies toward additional investments that are being used to promote the project and grow the community.

Marcomms Updates
As DPDK’s new marketing coordinator, Ben Thomas of Linux Foundation has been strategically increasing the project’s presence with a multi-tiered approach that includes: publishing the monthly newsletter (on the DPDK website with its own tab), ramping up social media, developing and publishing multiple end user stories with several ready for publication and others soon to be, updating DPDK’s summit branding, and reviewing all channel analytics and responding accordingly.

Introduction of New Participants:

Two new participants in the project were introduced to the board: tech writer David Thomas, who begins his contract on the project on June 12th, and marketing coordinator Benjamin Thomas of the Linux Foundation.

Community Lab Updates

A winter storm temporarily deprived the Community Lab of power in January. More recently, FIPS testing has been brought online, catching up the DPDK sample application to the formats used by NIST and their ACVP API, the automated process to move their encryption test vectors to/from their systems for validation. This was merged into the 22.11 release. Arm brought a new hardware system into the lab based on the Ultra CPU. Test coverage has also been extended for all applicable OSes to arm64 systems, effectively doubling the coverage. The Lab is continuing to contribute to the DTS improvements and merge into the DPDK main line. The RFC patch for DTS smoke tests has been submitted for the 23.07 release.  And finally,  in terms of bare metal and NIC enhancements, per the 2023 lab plans, each Gold member has been contacted about their desired NIC upgrade(s) or expansion(s) for the lab’s coverage. Initial responses led to a multiphase plan including: the purchase of three NICs, with three direct installs into existing servers and the third installed into a server donated by intel; the development of a plan for a 4th NIC that will involve retiring an older NIC, having a gold member request to select an alternate, and exploring alternate server install locations; and the gathering of information on two additional requests that were non-NICs/development platforms. 

Tech Board Updates

DPDK 23.03 was released recently. In addition to this there were still some new devices/drivers/libraries happening on the project – including support for Arkville cards, which is an RTL for FPGAs for the PCI side. There was a new driver to support one of Intel’s new IPU chips, a smart NIC with an ASIC, and there was a machine learning library MLL – a library to expose some machine learning accelerators had by Marvell on their chips under SLCs.  In addition to the new hardware/drivers/libraries, DPDK has new crypto, new algorithms, updates to many drivers. In terms of hardware offloading, for RT flow, there are new rules.  Regarding LTS releases, 3 streams are in progress: 20.11, 21.11, and 22.11. 

Financial Updates

The project retains a healthy financial surplus. Current projections for 2023 expenditures have increased slightly given the hire of David Thomas as Tech Writer, the approval of travel reimbursements for Governing Board and Tech Board Members for the Dublin 2023 Userspace Event, and a slight increase in marketing allotments for coordinator Benjamin Thomas. The project’s revenues for 2023 are now projected to be close to its expenditures. 

Marketing Updates

Newly appointed marketing coordinator Ben Thomas, from the Linux Foundation, laid out a metric-driven strategy to more effectively and broadly reach the DPDK community in the months ahead. He observed that outstanding work is happening around the project and in its community, but DPDK needs a greater volume of content, sent out more frequently and strategically, to keep everyone informed of recent developments. Mr. Thomas presented a two-phase strategy to make this happen, that included maintaining current membership status through 2024 renewals by increasing brand awareness, and increasing the user and contributor base by boosting community reach and awareness.  Mr. Thomas then laid out a plan for systematically mapping out the KPIs across the website and across social media, falling into categories including website, social media, live video webinars, email communications, blogs and collateral, and PR outreach. These strategies will be carried out in the months ahead.

Event Updates

The DPDK Governing Board previously approved budget coverage of select Governing Board and Tech Board expenses for Userspace 2023, to take place in Dublin, Ireland from Sep. 12-13, 2023. The project is still working on securing a venue for the event, and exploring several options with Events Coordinator Evi Harmon, of the Linux Foundation. In the weeks and months ahead, Ms. Harmon’s team plans to coordinate various critical aspects of event planning that include launching the CFP, setting up and launching an event website, setting up event registration, and ultimately posting the speaker agenda once it has been decided by the Program Committee. The Events Team will be onsite in Dublin during Userspace to ensure a successful experience for all onsite and virtual attendees. 

Marketing Evaluation: A discussion took place regarding a pending choice between a proposed customization of the current Linux Foundation Tier 3 marketing package and a proposed outsourcing to Open Infra, a small marketing agency in Frisco, Texas. Hilary Carter, SVP of Research and Communications for Linux Foundation, joined the meeting and led board members through a deck that presented many of the benefits associated with retaining Linux Foundation as our marketing arm; the board also reviewed the presented benefits of outsourcing. Ultimately a formal decision was deferred by the board until a successive Governing Board meeting. The board requested a comparison of the two options with quantified breakdowns of deliverables in the interim. A formal vote and decision will take place at the next Governing Board meeting on the basis of these findings. 

Member Renewal and Budget Discussion: Most members have either paid their 2023 LF project renewals or set renewals in motion; those that haven’t have expressed a firm commitment to doing so.

A 2023 budget review detailed the carryover from 2022, as well as the projected membership dues and expenses for 2023, including rough high-level projections for marketing and events, bearing in mind that forthcoming decisions in both areas will help define and shape these costs more precisely. Overall the project is in a strong place fiscally with a surplus, and the Governing Board voted to approve the 2023 budget with no immediate objections presented.

Events Discussion: A discussion took place regarding options for a single in-person DPDK event, likely to take place in September 2023. The team has explored various cities as possibilities and leans toward Dublin, Ireland given the logistical feasibility of this choice, the presence of several tech heavyweights in that area and the strong turnout for prior Open Source events over the past year.  With this in mind, the LF events coordinator has been asked to run high-level costs, including venue costs, for Dublin at that time. It was agreed that said event will be a hybrid one, with live and virtual options. Specific costs from the coordinator will be reviewed by Board Members via email, and formal decisions on venue and event budget made in successive Governing Board meetings. 

Brief Summary of Governing Board Minutes from 10/11/22

Introduction: Two new arrivals on the project, Robin Giller of intel (replacing St. Leger) and Evi Harmon of LF Marketing (replacing Emily Ruf) introduced themselves and discussed their professional backgrounds.

Changes in Representation: A discussion took place on the pending replacement of the Governing Board Chair. The group also discussed the prospective addition of a vice chair to DPDK, which will necessitate modifications to the language of the current DPDK charter. The group agreed to formally make this decision regarding new charter language, and proceed with the vice chair nomination, via email.

Marketing and Events Updates: The group recapped on registration numbers and attendance for Userspace, and also discussed issues tied to the virtual experience on Zoom for Userspace attendees and strategic ways to enhance the virtual (remote) experience in the future. Several End User Stories were reviewed, as well as forthcoming marketing and outreach efforts.

Financial Updates: DPDK is in healthy financial shape at present, but the networking industry in general faces some key challenges over the coming year. The project is currently in the process of going through membership renewals for 2023.  We need Governing Board approval on the Statement of Work for the University of New Hampshire Community Lab for 2023.

UNH Lab Updates: Operational costs for the Lab in 2023 have increased slightly despite no changes to the SOW. The Governing Board requested additional clarity on this and agreed to seek it via email prior to approving said budget.

Tech Board Updates: The GB tech board rep discussed some concerns regarding the merge of a new Google Driver, tied to the fact that the base code has an MIT license, and the DPDK charter only covers a BSD license. The group discussed the proposed modification of the DPDK charter to cover both licenses. The process of hiring a tech writer is underway. The group also discussed the addition of KPI trackers in the near future.

Discussion re: Changing Perceptions of DPDK: Some concerns were raised during the Userspace event about the  public perception that DPDK has a high barrier to entry. Comments shared at Userspace indicated a concern about DPDK’s high barrier to entry. A team is now looking into the comment to see if it’s a widely shared view, and if it is, what might the project community do about it.