Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - October 30, 2024

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/97880950229?password=81d2940e-c055-43b9-9b5a-6cd7d7090feb

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation
Andrew Grimberg - LF Release Engineering

Other Attendees

Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Ben Giles, Caligara
Chris Viennau, MovieLabs / ZTWG
Spencer Stephens, MovieLabs / ZTWG
Jim Helman, MovieLabs / ZTWG
Daryll Strauss, MovieLabs / ZTWG
Josh Bainbridge, Framestore
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Tim Grant
Lee Kerley, Apple

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Agenda

General Updates
- OpenQMC #434
- Project Leads Office Hours #760
- OpenAPV - defining 6 month milestones #877
Open Shading Language #437
Zero Trust Working Group #621

Notes

General Updates
- OpenAPV - defining 6 month milestones #877
  - Eric R: email thread going with Youngkwon
  - Meeting with Sam regularly
  - Can skip update at next meeting, can update the one after that
- Project Leads Office Hours #760
  - John: working to reschdule with holiday season
  - Last meeting we discussed fuzzing and upstreamed to best practices folks. Larry: need further guidance based on the nature of the projects. Also dependency management for C / C++ (requirement for an explicit list, which is tricky when handled by CI / CMake)
  - JC (chat): find_package definitely doesn’t apply as a machine readable way of listing dependencies
- Month away from Annual Elections for Chairperson: John
  - Larry becomes chair, so he’s looking for a vice chair
  - If you are interested in, Larry is a great teacher and can provide guidance. Reach out and let us know. Will formalize in December.
  - Larry: “it’s not so bad”! We model this after the way we rotate through Digipro chairs: one person who did it the year before paired up with someone who is doing it for the first time. That seems to have worked well there, hope it does here. Look forward to someone else doing it, you get to “retire” after 2 years.
Open Shading Language #437
- Chris K / Larry
- SlideDeck
- TAC Project Review - October 30, 2024
- What is Open Shading Language
  - Shading language for modern production renderers
  - A complier and efficient runtime for the language
  - Leverages LLVM for execution on CPU and GPU
  - Project just turned 16 years old (first commit Sept 3, 2008)
  - ASWF member since 2020
  - Software Supporting OSL
    - 3ds Max, Arnold, Blender/Cycles, 3delight, Renderman, V-Ray, Octane, Redshift…
  - Studio Renderers
    - Animal Logic’s Glimpse, Imageworks’ SPEAR/Arnold, Illumnation Labs
  - Ties to other ASWF projecgts
    - Dependencies…
- OSL TSC
  - Meets Every other week
    - TSC chair: Chris Kulla
    - Architect: Larry Gritz
  - 11 Total Voting Members
    - Autodesk, Intel, Blender, Epic Games, DNEG, NVIDIA, Sony Imageworks, Apple, Animal Logic, Laika, Pixar
  - Usually 5-10 additional attendees
  - A good forum also for general discussions about rendering and shading
- What’s new in OSL this year?
  - Released OSL v1.13
    - 10 points releases since February
    - Bumped minimum versions across our dependencies
      - Optix 7, OIIO 2.4, Imath 2.4
    - Initial support for modern LLVM (v18)
    - Improvements to NVPTX backend (NVIDIA GPUs)
    - Texture call accepts colorspace keyword
    - API changes for renderer integration
    - lockgeom metadata is now interactive and interpolated
      - More accurately describes intent of shader parameters
      - Reduces runtime optimization costs for large networks
    - New journaling API for printing messages and errors from shaders
      - More GPU friendly
    - Many bug fixes
  - OSL 1.14 highlights - later this year
    - Testrender
      - MaterialX / OpenPBR Oren-Nayar & Sheen BSDFS
      - Support for triangle meshes, displacement, GPU
    - A variety of improvements to OptiX / CUDA back end
      - More feature parity, performance, bug fixes
      - Production use in several renderers now
    - No more boost dependency!
    - Support for LLVM 18 and 19
    - Support for OIIO 3.0
    - Docs now on htps://open-shading-language.readthedocs.io (replaces LaTeX based system)
    - Testrender demo images, not a production render
    - In Progress
      - Raise dependency minimums (VFX Platform 2022)
        
        C++17 / gcc 9.3 / Python 3.7 / Imath 3.x
        
        Maybe also bumps for CMake, LLVM
      - Dependency auto-build capabilities (similar to OIIO)
      - Continued GPU improvements
      - Improved guidelines on standard attributes and UI metadata
        
        See GitHub discussion page
        
        Needs to update documentation, and implement suggestions in testshade/testrender
        
        Want to improve portability of OSL shaders across renderers
        
        Help needed from DCC vendors for UI discussions
  - Roadmap - beyond 1.14
    - Continued transition from RendererServices to “free functions” provided as LLVM bitcode
    - SPIR-V back end (ongoing work by Intel)
    - Lightweight oslcomp (new processor, no more libclang)
    - Evolutions to language syntax
      - New datatypes to more closely match MaterialX
      - Ability to re-evaluate connected nodes in a material graph
      - Shader-writer improvements: named function call arguments? templates?
    - Infrastructure work
      - Need Windows and GPU CI (help wanted!)
  - Dev Days
    - First time participating
    - Unsure how many would join
    - Got 3 participants
      - 1 patch accepted
      - 1 patch pending CLA
      - 1 contributor spent the full day figuring out the Windows build (instructions may turn into a PR)
    - Better than expected, will likely keep participating
    - Hard to find “good first issues” for us
  - Current Status
    - OpenSSF Best Practices
      - Passing 100%
      - Silver 84%
      - Gold 78%
    - Most outstanding items are security related
      - Some low hanging fruit around docs, signing, etc…
      - Need help to add fuzzing to the project
      - OSL lets you execute arbitrary user code by design
      - Should not format your hard-drive or let you gain elevated privileges, but could loop forever
      - …
  - How to get Involved
    - TSC meetings are every other Thursday at 2PM Pacific Time
    - Slack channel
      - #openshadinglanguage
    - GitHub
      - https://openshadinglanguage.org
  - Larry:
    - calling out great contributions from AL, Intel
    - Feels like a widely collaborative project across the industry
  - Kimball: motion to renew. Michael J: second
    - Renewed for a year in Adopted stage
Zero Trust Working Group #621
- Slide Deck
- Jim: WG approve in April, didn’t get first meeting until September.
- ASWF - Zero Trust Working Group
  - Brief Description: ASWF ZTWG is developing strategies to implement Zero Trust security across media production workflows and tools, ensuring secure, authenticated access for users and systems in cloud-based and collaborative environments.
  - TSC Chair: Daryll Strauss
  - Contributed by: MovieLabs
- Chris Vienneau presenting
- Bi-weekly meetings on Thrusday at 1pm PST
  - MovieLabs:
    - Jim Helman
    - Chris Vienneau
    - Spencer Stephens
  - Amazon
    - Blake Franzen
  - Google
    - Toby Scales
  - Foundry
    - Daniel Hutchison…
- General Goals
  - Establish Implementation Guidelines
  - Enhance Security Awareness
  - Develope Shared Security Frameworks
  - Promote Interoperability
- Possible areas to work on identified
  - Define Identity Management Standards
  - Develop best practices for using Authentication and Authorization Services
  - Enhance Network Service Security for plug-ins
  - Create a Standardized Approach to Zero Trust in ASWF projects
  - Document collaborative security between organizations
  - Establish Zero Trust education and training
- Key Achievements in the past six months
  - Project established
  - …
- Identify Management
  - Most people using SSO solution, harder in desktop than web application, doesn’t cover what happens with plug-ins. We broke discussion down into identity tokens and access tokens. You probably want to limit functionality of access tokens. Identity management seems more likely to want to be used across plug-ins / applications. Can we do this in a way where there’s an agent that manages it, or a central keystore. Want to avoid having users authenticating multiple times. Concept of a “driver’s license”.
- Areas the project could use help on
  - Outreach to ASWF contributors
  - Vendors to help with best practices and review
  - Put working group in ASWF Landscape
  - Collaboration with other security efforts at Linux Foundation
- Questions
  - Eric E: where does this touch other ASWF projects? RV?
    - Jim: OpenAssetIO will make connections to metadata and asset management systems. Chris: also OTIO in the demo we did. Larry: also OpenCue
  - Eric R: OTIO and USD have concept of asset resolvers, have to query a database to find asset. Daryll: we expect this to keep getting more important over time.
  - Larry: how do we broaden our thinking beyond beyond cloud storage. We have 1990s style command line tools that assume direct access to files.
  - Daryll: in an ideal ZTWG world, you would protect access to internal assets just like on the cloud, but today we still have NFS servers. Chris: Also want to avoid having to login 10 different times to 10 different systems. Jim: want to avoid interfering with creative process. Daryll: eventually a “open file IO” project?
  - Eric R: at work we have lots of cloud centric pipelines, we have a lot of bridge code to hide the fact that assets are in object storage and pretend it’s in local storage. It’s a good scoping to keep focussed on authorization. Jim: enough scope on security side, but eventually a separate project looking at implementation code could make sense.
  - Ben (chat): In HPC we would have a fuse like filesystem that used the local drive as a “L4 to L5” cache. And then leverage PAM and ACLs
- Meetings bi weekly Thursday 1PM Pacific
- John: we have quorum.
  - A year is fine
- JF: motion for a year renewal. Larry will second.
  - Motion carries
- John: congratulations, let use know how we can help
Scott: it has been said that the .io may be going away in the future, that would affect the aswf.io. We may need a contingency plan in future?
- John: we typically purchase multiple domains in advance for that
- Larry: would be hard to imagine this would happen without someone standing up a replacement “.io”, but the question is how much more expensive.
Ben: Daryll says MovieLabs has no way to share where the meeting is? Chris: I will publicize where the meeting, we originally private but will now be public (original meetings on Teams).