ASWF TAC Meeting - 17 May, 2023

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Premier member representatives

Project representatives

Carol Payne - OpenColorIO
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Joshua Minor - OpenTimelineIO
Ken Museth - OpenVDB

Industry representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Other Attendees

David Morin, ASWF
John Mertic, LF
Emilly Olin, LF
Yarille Kilborn, LF
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Stephen Mackenzie, NVIDIA/Rez
Doug Walker, Autodesk
Sergio Rojas, Different Dimensions
Nick Porcino, Pixar
Ben Schofield
Scott Dyer, AMPAS
Spencer Stephens, MovieLabs
Erik Strauss, ORI
Robin Rowe, Cinepaint
Christina Tempelaar-Lietz, ILM
Gary Oberbrunner, OpenFX

Apologies

Eric Reinecke (first half)

Agenda

Updates
- Ideas for improving TAC agenda management
- CFP Open for Open Source Days
CI Working Group Project Review (JF)

Notes

John: LF Zoom platform will be switching back to a single link per event, no more individual links
John: also better DST adjustments for LF calendar
Ideas for improving TAC agenda management (John)
- Been using this system for a few months, helped us get agenda together, but what can we improve?
- Sometimes projects aren’t aware of annual reviews coming up, some have been scrambling at last minute
- JF: better cut-n-paste from spreadsheet to agenda. John: have other projects that use GitHub issues, can use tags to add items to agenda. The copy-n-paste can be improved on.
- Eric: we could just ditch the formatting
- JF: periodic reminder on the #tac channel a few days before the meeting, giving time for people to add agenda items
- John: does the process to request agenda items? Eric: is there a process outside of typing in the agenda? Carol: not sure of the process, normally I just add in something or ask John / Kimball? Eric: don’t mind reaching out. John: don’t want to be the blocker. JF: open / documented process is good.
- Kimball: better than making it up 5 minutes before the meeting starts!
Emily: CFP for Open Source Days is now open, talks don’t need to tie directly to ASWF, but should have an Open Source Angle. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions.
- Robin: what kinds of things are you watching for? I have a few ideas, for instance I could present on some of my projects (Cinepaint, CMaker, C security), don’t know if any of these could be of interest.
- Emily: def looking at newer / emerging topics, the program committee will review. Encourage to submit more than one, the program committee will review. Robin: any specific theme this year to help framing? Emily: no overarching team, the audience will be technical. Robin: that helps, Thank You!
- Kimball: adjacent to SIGGRAPH, so will draw some of that audience.
- David: we want to recognize that Open Source Forum worked quite well, even if the presentations were more general, they were diversified, we kept the audience of our audience from our audience for the whole duration, got really good feedback. Looking for presentations on the topic of Open Source. The presentation from Autodesk on how they open sourced RV was a highlight, hit many points in what we want to do and develop, so an experience in a company like Autodesk, something very new (touching Open Source to that level), the honest account of all the milestones they went through, the difficulties, but how it worked out in the end, that was really great. So any such story is good to bring, “here’s how we deal with open source” are great.
Larry: OIIO TSC formation on Monday, May 22nd
CI Working Group Project Review (JF)
- CI Working Group Status Report to ASWF TAC May 2023
- Map of github
- Mission - poorly named group, but work not just on CI but on the entire lifecycle
- Act as a forum for the exchange of ideas
- Want to find projects that are doing cool things and generalize / share with other groups
- Nothing done is prescriptive, projects are free to adopt or not. Hope instead that what the group provides is useful and helpful
- One meeting every 4 weeks, on the off cadence from the TAC meeting
- Averaging 8.03 attendees (4-12)
- In terms of renewing working group, still plenty of things to do. Would like to be renewed
- Meeting notes are all on github (link in pres above)
- Slack channel has 245 members, reasonable traffic
  - Use the slack channel for general discussion
  - Specific things like secrets and such, remember that there is an official linux foundation help
- Limitations of github-hosted free runners
  - 2 core, time limited, x86 only
  - Self hosting is possible but tricky, very hard to not just turn into a cryptomining farm
  - Integration into AWS CodeBuild - requires LF involvement
  - ASWF is now classified as an enterprise github org
    - Higher limits on GHA minutes
    - Access to larger (for pay) runners
      - Informally managed
    - Early access to GPU runners, OSL trying but thwarted by setup for optix, not yet costed
    - No ETA for apple silicon
  - Testing
    - All the things (ctest, pytest, et al)
    - Thinking about how to test GUI applications
  - External integrations (SonarCloud, OSS-Fuzz)
    - Helps find unreported bugs
  - PyPI are going to have an organizational level, ASWF has signed up
    - An attempt to address things such as supply chain attacks
  - Paid docker hub
    - No throttling on downloads, available to all projects (org level secrets)
  - Jfrog artifactory
    - If interested, can store build artifacts
  - ASWF-docker project
    - Layered containers, one for each project to provide a build project
    - Larry: not limited to ASWF, if you have a similar project, can use that and have an environment to make CI faster
    - aswf/vfx-all has everything, USD, stuff. Good starting spot for test environments
    - Easy place to have a container that is still based on Centos7.9 (where most facilities have moved past Centos7)
  - WIP
    - Working towards using conan to package individual builds
      - Controlled build environment
      - Has cuda / opengl - normal stuff
      - Work towards assemblage, would improve ability to construct different combinations than base sets
    - VFX Platform 2023
      - Build on rocky 8, run on rocky 9
      - Based on nvidia cuda/gl containers, but not maintained by nvidia any longer, but CI group has taken that on
      - Very close
    - Need to add other new projects
    - Foundry contributed a set of conan recipes to repackage open source recipe
    - For 2024, do we transition to EL 9
      - Worth a poll
      - Qt 6.5 is going to be the big transition
    - Containers on windows have limitations
    - MacOS support for containers should improve / be easier with conan
  - ASWF has a confluence instance
  - Also readthedocs has a paid instance
  - OpenSSF Badging requirements review
    - Most of the information exists in meeting notes
    - Some things have been fed back to SSF group in terms of stumbling blocks
    - Any project finding blockers, please talk with the working group
  - Any other assistance, please ask
  - Wave, Eric: people new to conan, where to learn more
    - conan.io/faq.html
    - Going to a v 2.0, fully open source but backed by a commercial company (jfrog)
    - Has central Repository of recipes, but CI group initially had to vendor some of those recipes
      - Want to vendor as little as possible but needed to customize for versions of python
      - Has an interesting patch set thing
      - Continuing discussion
  - If you are struggling with build resources, is an argument for using paid resources, don’t suffer, ask
  - MacOS hardware is a github limitation
  - EricR: if github can’t provide, we could use custom runners
    - JF: true, did some experiments, macstadium. Main issue is system administration, hard to have resources for that, although github does keep saying they will add M1 support