[stratum-announce] Stratum 2021-10-09 Release and Call to Action
Brian O'Connor
Dear Stratum Community!
We would first like to thank you for being a member of this community and for your contributions. Over the past four years, the Stratum community has achieved a lot:
Demonstrated how P4 can be used to model fixed-pipeline ASICs,
Used P4 to program a variety of flexible targets, including ASICs, FPGAs, and CPUs,
Controlled a multi-vendor, multi-ASIC leaf-spine fabric using ONOS and the Trellis control applications,
Read statistics and configured peripherals using gNMI, including long-range optical transceivers,
Automated device testing using TestVectors enabling CI/CD for the switch OS,
Deployed Stratum in a variety of production environments, including ONF’s Aether fabric,
Improved and evolved P4Runtime using real world use cases with the P4 API working group,
Educated community on the benefits of P4Runtime and gNMI.
In addition, Stratum is part of ONF’s Continuous Certification Program and a few companies have certified their switches with Stratum. Stratum switches have been taken into commercial deployments by a number of users.
Today, we are pleased to announce the Stratum 2021-10-09 release (or 21.10 for short). This release contains several new features and fixes for Stratum's Intel Barefoot Tofino target and will be part of the upcoming first ONF SD-Fabric release; stratum_bfrt is now the default and recommended target for Tofino users. This release makes debugging easier on all Stratum targets by stamping version information into binaries when they are compiled and logging that information on Stratum startup. It also contains first time contributions from Pier Luigi Ventre.
Pre-built Docker images and Debian packages, along with a more extensive changelist, are available in the GitHub release page:
https://github.com/stratum/stratum/releases/tag/2021-10-09
However over the past several months, ONF has observed that the community is not getting adequate support from its members. While we have a number of code contributors, we have recently been lacking code maintainers who help triage bugs and issues, work with contributors on feature designs, and review code contributions. Unfortunately, our previously active maintainers have moved on to new projects/companies, and we feel that the core of the community is at risk of shrinking.
As with every community, it is only as active as its members. With this message, we would like to issue a call to action to all interested community members to step up their participation in the Stratum community. Open source communities are healthiest when multiple companies are represented from the user level all the way up through leadership, and we are asking ONF member companies for your support!
We are looking for new maintainers to step up from our community. A new maintainer is someone who climbs the developer learning curve through multiple code submissions, then starts taking responsibility for the contributions of others through design/code review, work with authors, etc. Ultimately, we would like to add at least a few new maintainers by the end of this year; there are further growth opportunities that will emerge in the future (e.g. becoming a TST member).
If you would like to become a maintainer or explore other ways you can contribute to the Stratum community, please reach out to Ain Indermitte and Brian O'Connor.
As always, we thank you for your continued support of this community!
On behalf of the Stratum TST,
Brian O’Connor (Lead, ONF)
Alireza Ghaffarkhah (Google)
Craig Stevens (Dell/EMC)
Max Pudelko (ONF)
Yi Tseng (ONF)
Ain Indermitte
Dear Stratum Community!
Last week Brian sent an email asking for your help in keeping the Stratum community alive and kicking (see below). Since we have not received any responses yet, we think the Call-to-Action part may have been overlooked in the long email.
We would like to repeat the Call-to-Action from last week!
We are looking for new maintainers to step up from our community. A maintainer is someone who has climbed the developer learning curve through multiple code submissions, and starts taking responsibility for the contributions of others through design/code review, work with authors, etc. Ultimately, we would like to add a few new maintainers by the end of this year, and there are further growth opportunities that will emerge in the future (e.g., becoming a TST member).
If you would like to become a maintainer or explore other ways you can contribute to the Stratum community, please reach out to Ain Indermitte and Brian O'Connor.
As always, we thank you for your continued support of this community!
On behalf of the Stratum TST,
Brian O’Connor (Lead, ONF)
Alireza Ghaffarkhah (Google)
Craig Stevens (Dell/EMC)
Max Pudelko (ONF)
Yi Tseng (ONF)