Members Attending ================= Aaron Conole Bruce Richardson Hemant Agrawal Jerin Jacob Kevin Traynor Konstantin Ananyev Morten Brørup Patrick Robb Stephen Hemminger (Chair) Thomas Monjalon
NOTE ==== The technical board meetings are on every second Wednesday at 3 pm UTC. Meetings are public. DPDK community members are welcome to attend on Zoom: https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/96459488340?password=d808f1f6-0a28-4165-929e-5a5bcae7efeb Agenda: https://annuel.framapad.org/p/r.0c3cc4d1e011214183872a98f6b5c7db Minutes of previous meetings: http://core.dpdk.org/techboard/minutes Next meeting will be on: Wednesday 4-February-2026 at 3pm UTC, and will be chaired by: Thomas 1. Security Mailing List Registrations --------------------------------------- Three registration requests were reviewed: one was withdrawn due to the requester having left the company. The board agreed that members of the security pre-release list must be those responsible in an org for handling security vulnerabilities. As such, Thomas took the action to verify the applicants roles. 2. Fast Free with Multi-Segment Packets ---------------------------------------- Morten and Bruce investigated whether Fast Free can work with multi-segment packets. Bruce implemented it in Intel scalar TX paths and measured a small but consistent improvement. The original Fast Free definition requires single refcount, not single segment. With Fast Free, chains can be safely broken at TX time since no other users hold references, allowing direct bulk return to the mempool at cleanup. Decision: Fast Free does not imply single-segment. Drivers must check both Fast Free and multi-segs flags independently. Failure to handle multi-segment packets with Fast Free is a driver bug. Action: Morten and Bruce to update the documentation. 3. Stockholm May Summit ------------------------ Stephen has submitted talks. Aaron plans a talk on AI in the CI pipeline. Action: Stephen to check with Nathan on CFP submission status. 4. AI-Assisted Code Review --------------------------- Stephen requested feedback on AI review outputs, especially false positives. The board discussed output format, preferring concise summaries on the mailing list with detail available in Patchwork. Reviews currently go to the test-report list via Patchwork. AI reviews should only trigger after all CI checks pass (per David Marchand's request), with a delay to allow superseded series to be skipped. A manual trigger (e.g. "recheck-request: force-llm-bot") will be available, limited to people in the MAINTAINERS file. Vote: Board unanimously approved entrusting the API key to Patrick Robb at UNH for hosting the review infrastructure. Action: Thomas to transfer the API key to Patrick. 5. Python Checkpatch --------------------- Stephen presented a Python replacement for the current shell/Perl checkpatch, created with AI assistance. It processes a 20-patch series in under a second vs. up to 5 minutes with the current tool. It is tailored to DPDK rules, table-driven, and should work on Windows. The board agreed to run both tools in parallel in CI to compare results before switching. The new script should be added to the DPDK repository as experimental. Action: Stephen to submit. CI team to run it in parallel with the existing checkpatch. Note: Renamed to dpdk-checkpatch.py in the submission. 6. RTE Pointer Macros - Qualifier Preservation ----------------------------------------------- The new RTE_PTR_ADD/SUB macros preserve const/volatile qualifiers instead of stripping them. This may break code that relied on the qualifier-stripping side effect, but the fix is trivial (use RTE_CAST_PTR). The board considered this a bug fix. Decision: Keep the new macros. Document the change in release notes. 7. New BPF Library Co-Maintainer --------------------------------- Marat Khalili approved as BPF library co-maintainer alongside Konstantin Ananyev. 8. Maintainers List Review --------------------------- Some patches (hash library, null driver) have had no maintainer response. Morten suggested a periodic email to maintainers to confirm they are still active. Action: Board to consider a periodic maintainer activity check. 9. Any Other Business ---------------------- Morten asked about Wi-Fi driver work for DPDK. A company called Umber Networks https://umbernetworks.com is exploring centralized Wi-Fi with remote radio heads. Thomas suggested this as a Stockholm summit talk topic.
