ASWF TAC Meeting - June 03, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

  • Daniel Heckenberg - Chairperson, Animal Logic Pty Ltd
  • Gordon Bradley, Autodesk
  • Pilar Molina Lopez, Blue Sky Studios, Inc.
  • Michael O’Gorman, Cisco Systems Inc.
  • Henry Vera, DNEG
  • Bill Ballew, DreamWorks Animation
  • Matt Kuhlenschmidt, Epic Games, Inc.
  • Brian Cipriano, Google & OpenCue Representative
  • Sean C McDuffee, Intel Corporation
  • Larry Gritz, Sony Pictures Imageworks
  • Jean-Francois Panisset, VES Technology Committee
  • Cory Omand, The Walt Disney Studios
  • Kimball Thurston, Weta Digital Limited
  • Eric Enderton, NVIDIA
  • Sean Looper, Amazon Web Services
  • Michael Min, Netflix
  • Michael B. Johnson, Apple
  • Dave Fellows, Microsoft
  • Sean O’Connell, Advanced Micro Devices
  • Ken Museth, OpenVDB Representative
  • Michael Dolan, OpenColorIO Representative
  • Cary Phillips, OpenEXR Representative
  • Joshua Minor, OpenTimelineIO Representative
  • Chris Kulla (Open Shading Language Representative)

Other Attendees

  • John Mertic (Linux Foundation)
  • Emily Olin (Linux Foundation)
  • JT Nelson (Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group)
  • Nick Porcino, Pixar
  • Michael Zink, Warner Bros
  • Mitch Prater, LAIKA
  • Owen Thompson, OpenEXR
  • Ricky Rieckenberg, Walt Disney Animation

Apologies

Agenda

  • Goals for TAC: Year 2

  • ASWF Grants and Fund

    • Project areas?

  • Events (Emily)

    • SIGGRAPH

      • Moving to mid-August, no set date yet.

    • Open Source Day / Week

      • ASWF Open Source Day will be a 2 day event, were going to do it Thu-Fri before SIGGRAPH, but now TBD

      • Reached out to Digipro (Saturday?) and Pipeline Conference (Sunday?) to coordinate

      • Every project to give updates, inviting outside projects such as Res, MaterialX, USD

      • Inviting studio execs to discuss how the projects are used

      • Use cases / production examples, keep interesting / more visual

      • Updates are going to be 30 minutes only (because of virtual attendance)

      • Working on platform, Zoom based, meeting form vs webinar form. Talking to Real Time Conference as well to see how they are doing things.

      • Looking at a ASWF BoF followed by a TAC BoF during SIGGRAPH itself.

      • Talk on OCIO submitted and accepted to Digipro

      • Pipeline Conference CFP is due this Friday (5-June-2020) if anyone wants to propose something.

      • Putting together a brief organizer template / guideline for the project updates, not prescriptive but can be useful.

  • Working Groups

    • Branching out on multiple fronts

    • CI Working Group (Daniel)

      • CI working group getting into mechanics of provisioning GPU runners, relies on the LF release engineering group

      • Starting to look at Mac and Windows build problems, in particular

      • New VFX Reference Platform aswf-docker Docker containers

      • RedHat Developer Toolset 9, discovered bug (compiler crash) in gcc 9, fixed in gcc 9.3.1, waiting for official build for CentOS (important for OSL)

      • Looks promising, will support C++ 17

      • Validates the approach of using Docker images in our infrastructure to test upcoming versions of the VFX Reference Platform.

      • New containers also have clang 10 and llvm 10, useful for testing.

      • Michael: heard from Andy at LF releng that the open issue for GPU builders is getting resolved.

      • Windows / Mac: good opportunity for someone with expertise in those areas to get involved in the CI working group.

      • Wave: someone in developer relations who is familiar with CI systems has volunteered to get involved, will have time after Apple Developer Conference

    • USD Working Group (Cory)

      • Suggestions for initiatives:

        • A public Wiki to share best practices, how to structure assets

        • Started discussion to John to look at how contributions could look like.

        • Full suite of USD tests running in GitHub, what it would it take to transition test suites currently running in Azure Pipelines, would use GPU instances

        • NVIDIA reaching out to see how they could help with lack of good image diffing tools

      • Meet again next week

      • Michael Min: some members had concerns of how to work with Pixar to get approval for all contributions. Will the WG always be gated by Pixar? Having to get approval for everything would limit the usefulness.

      • Cory: the WG is trying to help the Pixar USD team, so it’s important to keep the USD Team in the loop to make sure that initiatives are helpful. But don’t expect that every activity of the WG has to be approved by USD team. But wanted to make sure any WG initiatives aren’t “competing” with work being done or scheduled by USD team.

    • Python 3 Working Group

    • D&I Working Group

      • Emily: should have formal submission in a week

  • Project Updates

    • OpenEXR

      • Fuzz testing

      • Carey: had TSC meeting two week ago, invited two representatives from OSS-Fuzz project to join and discuss the service. Their presence was very helpful, put a lot of fears to rest.

      • OpenEXR agreed to sign up, one hour of work to do. Low key process.

      • OpenEXR has already had a lot of fuzzing testing, don’t expect a torrent of new reports. Bugs get reported privately, have 90 days to fix them before public notification, which looks doable.

      • Assumption is that reported bugs are easily reproduced with test cases / datasets.

      • Going from test case to fix has typically been pretty simple: integer overflow for instance, just needs a change of type. So doesn’t feel like we are signing up for a large amount of work.

      • Kimball: as we get more of a corpus of test cases, we probably need a regression test repository of problematic images.

      • Large repo of binary files, could be a separate section of the openexr-images repo, or a separate repo? There are already some “garbage images” in the openexr-images repo which should be integrated in the test suite.

      • Daniel: Openexr-images repo is still a separate repo, is it a sub repo? Carey: currently completely separate, have been intending to revamping it. Has not been moved into ASWF GitHub organization, still under the openexr organization, which needs to be closed.

      • Carey: got a report of a couple of bugs from someone at a security lab in Beijing, reporting a vulnerability. There was a test case, reproduced and fixed it. The reporter requested that OpenEXR requests a CVE so it can be tracked. But it sounds like this is an organization that may be looking for bug bounties, brings up the question of previous instances of people reporting bugs and filing CVEs. But first time someone has requested we file one ourselves. Wrote a summary and reached out to Dan Hutchinson at The Foundry (who had presented on security a year ago). Gordon: Autodesk has internal security team, has had to file CVEs, had issues reported against Maya and FBX. Can ask Autodesk team for an opinion / review. Carey: asking for confirmation that this is the right way to go about it. Gordon: Microsoft has filed a few CVEs against FBX (they do a lot of testing), then asked Autodesk to create them. CVE likes specific language in reports. Carey: will write to Autodesk team.

      • Owen Thomson, GSoC intern, first day of full time work was Monday.

    • OpenShadingLanguage Adoption

      • Chris: no update, still in holding pattern.

      • Larry: upcoming governing board / legal subcommittee meeting where this is supposed to be discussed, hoping for an agreement on the CLA language.

      • John: some language issues were raised by Disney legal counsel with the CLA used by most of our projects (except OpenCue which uses the Apache CLA). Bringing concerns to legal committee (next week), will discuss and come up with a recommendation. This may result in requests to each TSC / TSC chairs to potentially amend terms of CLA. Is a change to CLA retroactive? Depends on the nature of the change to the CLA.

      • Larry: we didn’t make contributors to projects before joining the ASWF sign a new CLA for old contributions. John: yes, this is not (typically) retroactive.

    • OpenCue Incubation Status

      • Daniel: according to our project lifecycle process, supposed to have annual review of projects in incubation, discuss and review progress. So good idea to have a conversation on this topic.

      • Brian: OpenCue has been making progress on this, discussed this on last TSC meeting which was joined by John. A few months ago identified some issues, in particular diversity and static analysis. Some progress on diversity, but not much progress on static analysis, have been focussing more on test coverage aspect rather than issues reported by static analysis tool. Should have more to report at next TAC meeting.

  • Qt licensing changes

    • Gordon: Maya is currently trying to navigate changes the Qt Company are making to their licensing. Removing Long Term Support from their open source offering. Historically Maya has used the open source version, studios have dependencies for their own in-house tools. Pinged the VFX Reference Platform team, no announcement / decision on this topic. Maya will have to make a difference sooner rather than later: should Maya move to commercial version, or stick with open source version.

    • Should we collectively decide what to do: stick to open source version with no long term maintenance, maintain our own branch?

    • Henry: started looking at options internally after discussion with Autodesk. A lot of internal software based on Qt. Decent sized R&D team that would require commercial licenses. No decision yet, but leaning towards open source version. Most facilities are using Qt for their internal software in one way or another.

    • Daniel: Qt is open source but the repository is not very open to contributions. So even if you want to fix a bug, it’s not clear if the fix will be accepted back to the main branch, so maintaining an open source branch would be a fork.

    • Gordon: Maya has been trying to move back to a “vanilla” version of Qt, had been making good progress feeding fixes back to main repo. Complicated discussions because of different ownership structure between the commercial and open source versions. We need a series of possible approaches to deal with this. Perhaps if the industry is leaning away from their version, that might have an influence on the Qt Company?

    • Gordon: Autodesk does have a commercial license for some of the components such as the installer. Autodesk will have to make decision sooner than the larger group.

    • Sean: should we start a group dedicated to this topic? Gordon: would be interested, are there enough people interested?

    • Nick: on the USD project, spend some time to help people who try to integrate Qt work into USD, may no longer accept these contributions if the Qt / PyQt license becomes too complex.

    • Gordon: agreed, preference for open source version.

    • Kimball: we probably shouldn’t worry about support, we don’t apply that criteria to other open source components we use.

    • Nick: definitely prefer to have a single version of Qt / PyQt to support.

    • Daniel: Autodesk and SideFX were maintaining patches against Qt for a long time to fix certain issues, for instance Wacom support, where changes weren’t being accepted back into the main repo. Want to be able to share the exact source that Maya is building against, and make sure to stick to the license. Keen to be on a common version.

    • Henry: facilities pushed Maya to try to adopt vanilla version of Qt

    • Kimball: VFX Reference Platform specified patches against Qt in previous years

    • Daniel: haven’t looked yet at the reaction of the KDE community, which is the main user of Qt.

    • Daniel: do we agree that the open source version remains the preferred version? Should we have the discussion just within the TAC, or with a wider audience? Happy to lead that discussion.

    • John: is the discussion more on the legal/business or developer side? Gordon: legal / business side.

    • John: LF happy to help within limits of its mandate.

    • Larry: not clear about “compatibility” issues. If commercial products selected the commercial version, would it create a compatibility gap between those who have a commercial license and those who don’t?

    • Gordon: 1 year of support gets mostly burned away just by transition to new version. API changes (headers) would not be able to be redistributed, and can’t get security fixes.

    • John: any of our current projects directly impacted? Larry: OSL uses Qt but just for a small thing. Brian: all GUI components written with PySide, same for OTIO. Also we include Qt in our Docker images (aswf-docker project).

    • Daniel: we can discuss on the TAC mailing list what are the next steps.

  • Next meeting

    • 17 June 2020

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

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