Good morning. It's Tuesday, September 15th, 803 and this is a joint meeting of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee and the Senate Ag Committee to address an outstanding issue that's been with us for a few years. So I don't know who wants to, in terms of context, who can set up the meeting in terms of what did we try to do before and in what way did that fall short and so what do we have left to do? I think Michael probably would be the best person to back up, but before he starts, I just, this is Senator Starr. I would just say that the fair, Addison County Field Days fair people, a little history. A group of people or a person donated a welcome center, a new building to the fairgrounds, Addison County Field Days rather, and so the building was donated to the fairgrounds or to the field days and they decided they already had three bathroom systems that were set up on holding tanks and so they thought it would be really nice to put a modern bathroom and wash system wash bay so people could clean up after and everything in this new building and so this is what started this process was that that was when they applied for a holding tank it was, I guess it wasn't approved, it was determined that a leach field type system would best serve the situation environmentally and it was going to cost so much that it was prohibitive from, they couldn't do it so then we got mixed up in it and I'll let Michael take off from there. Thank you. Okay so I'm just going to give you the context legally including what you did two years ago so I'm going to share the screen and show you the statutory section 10 vsa 1979 on holding tanks just one second and hold on a second all right can you see my screen? Yes so there as you all know since you worked on these issues before if you're going to put a wastewater system into the ground in Vermont a new one you need a permit from the agency of natural resources department of environmental conservation there is a section in statute that allows certain entities to use holding tanks instead of a septic tank or leach field or other system but the who can use the holding tank is limited you'll see in 10 vsa 1979 subsection a that there's a section for allowing people that when at the building is publicly owned but then you go down to b1 there's also a subsection that allows the secretary to approve the use of a sewage holding a pump out tank for existing or proposed buildings or structures that are owned by charitable religious or non-profit organizations so field days and and other agricultural affairs are non-profit organizations but there are certain conditions that need to be met one of those conditions was on b1c where the design flows do not exceed 600 gallons per day or the existing or proposed building or structure shall not be used to host events on more than 28 days in any calendar year that last phrase where the proposed building or structure shall not be used to host events on more than 28 days in a calendar year that was added two years ago by the general assembly to address events like the agricultural fairs specifically the addison county field and fair days so where the there's not going to be continuous yearly use or even significant use across several months just 28 days in any calendar year and that that was added but there are also other conditions that are required to get a holding tank permit under 10 vsa 1979 one of those is in b2 sub division b2 where it says before constructing a holding tank applicant shall post a bond or other financial surety sufficient to finance maintenance of the holding tank for the life of the system which shall be at least 20 years so this is what you're going to be looking at today this bond slash financial surety requirement the issue here is that it's often difficult if not not possible for an applicant to get a bond or financial surety from a financial institution for a holding tank so this this is being proposed to be struck as a requirement for those events that are held on no more than 28 days in any calendar year now the reason that the financial surety provision is in there is as the language says to ensure the maintenance of the holding tank for the life of the system but there's also another requirement in this section that requires that the um that the owner of a holding tank at subsection h the owner of the holding tank shall maintain a valid contract with a licensed wastewater hauler at all times the contract shall require the licensed wastewater hauler to provide written notice of the dates of pumping and volume of wastewater pumped and so there is already a another maintenance requirement under subsection h for the holding tank to be maintained under a valid contract with a licensed wastewater hauler so so that's the this section and so i'm going to now share the screen can you see the screen now yeah so this is the amendment and really um most of this language is being provided for context the specific change is going to be in b2 which i just referenced it's that financial surety requirement and it says before constructing a holding tank the applicant shall post a bond or other financial surety sufficient to finance maintenance of the tank for the life of the system provided that a bond or other financial surety is not required for a holding a pump out tank for a building a structure that is not used to host events more than 28 days in any calendar year so just that that financial surety isn't required for those small non-profit charitable buildings or structures where the the holding tanks not going to be used for more than 28 days any calendar year so that that is what's being proposed okay and and uh i think uh commissioner walk is with us uh also senator bray yeah and uh you might want to hear y'all their side of this issue um before before we go over to one commissioner walk senator rogers had his hand up and thank you thank you senator bray i i guess my question would be why we leave that financial surety thing in it all i know of uh folks around here that have holding tanks individual ones and they certainly don't meet that standard uh i would think it'd be next to impossible to get a bond like that if there's another provision in there that requires them to to have the uh inspection and the contract and and records and all that stuff i'm not sure why we don't just strike the whole section well there is and brian redmond who's on might be better to talk about this but there's opportunity for people to get a holding tank without meeting all the requirements of 1979 generally it's when it's a best fix when your previous system fails and the best way to address your your wastewater needs add an existing structure is to the use of a holding tank and then there are requirements under the rule and the permit that you get for the maintenance and operation of that holding tank and i don't know if brian wants to add anything to that well before ryan could could bruce get her thank you senator star i'll let brian answer that question and then i'll because mine's on a slightly different topic so go ahead brian sure actually uh mic you're you're right on point there i have nothing else to add there's a exemption section of the rules that allows us to approve holding tanks as a best fix when full full compliance can't be achieved when responding to a failed wastewater system so you're you're right on point um i have a question i don't know if this is for mr redmond or or the commissioner what's the the um i mean i'm guessing can someone describe the risk there was a motivation to have a bond to begin with or financial surety of some sort so what's the risk we're trying to mitigate through having that kind of financial bond or instrument i'll defer to mic to the legislative history i think this is it's frankly a belt and suspenders at this point if we require a contract for the pump out and we have our normal enforcement mechanisms through any permitting process that the the financial surety piece is is another way to ensure that that happens from a functional standpoint it's hard to imagine a system that uh is not you know not living it up to its permit and continue you know it's simply a sort of failed system and it's continuing to operate and therefore needs the financial surety to maintain operations for 20 years we're not going to let that system continue to operate in an instance where it's not you know meeting its compliance obligations and so it really that that amount of money is likely never to come into play can we get through 10 now thank you bobby um i just wanted to provide a little bit more background um about uh the conversations that i've been having with both um the department of environmental conservation um commissioner walk and his team and also the uh adison county field days this summer sorry about that i'll mute thank you brian i don't know why he did it just when you spoke ruth but um uh anyway so um the field days uh as as um senator star said built this building two years ago last year it opened last year i actually have used the bathroom in this brand new james foster welcome center um and they install the tank that um may or may not be sufficient size to meet the flow needs and so they've been working with dc to measure the flow and try to figure out if the tank is sufficient um we um the general assembly did pass the provision that that michael um noted um to allow them to have a tank rather than go to the soil based um system for the field days because that was uh really expensive for a five day event and then this summer um they've been trying to work with dc to replace the tank or figure out if they do need to replace the tank that they have in there um and as you know all of the fairs this year were canceled um so they are having even more financial difficulties so replacing this tank that they already have is quite expensive and so we are trying to figure out ways to help them be able to do the right thing to replace the tank for if necessary based on the recommendations of dc um and this as came up as a potential way to help ease the financial burden of making sure that they have a sufficient tank um and it was um we had a meeting with all the field days people and all the dc people to sort of go back through the history of what was what had occurred um not everybody um who was is at dc now was part of the whole long process so it was a really helpful meeting i think we got most people or everybody on the same page as a plan and dc recommended this as a potential um fix to help assist field days in um uh installing a new tank they will still meet all the requirements it will just be more financially feasible for them to do so especially given the hardship this year and one of the reasons that it's important if possible that we do it now rather than wait for the for this winter is so that they can get the new tank installed now um there there wasn't a fair so we sort of have this window of opportunity for them to be able to move forward with this project and have everything in place and up to code and financed by the time we hopefully have another fair next summer so um just wanted to provide a little bit more background on that um we met i believe uh peter earlier it was in early august during the time we had the meeting and i felt like it was a really productive meeting and i'm grateful that we are now talking about this and hopefully can move forward with something that will help them finance this new tank so thank you so it's the short bit that they're going to save money by not going out and buying a bond paying for a bond and then they're going to apply the savings there to helping make it a little more affordable to install the larger tank that apparently they need according to dc guidelines right and they're still my understanding is they're still working with dc to figure out they're doing the flow measurements to figure out what size precisely they need i think they had originally hoped that maybe they could afford a full soil based system that would connect all the the bathrooms at the fair and that's possible in the future that would this wouldn't preclude that but at this point that's not financially feasible so they want to make sure that the tank that they do install is sufficiently sized and affordable moving forward for the fair right so one last money question does anyone know how much their financial surety instrument cost them in the past and how much they're going to save and then how much that helps towards their next upgrade we we heard that number uh back a year saw a year and a half ago and it was it was a lot of money and i mean it was up in the uh like over the life of it it was way up in the thousands of dollars and but the the other problem down there is that clay soil uh if they put an in-ground system in in the clay it was it was going to be rough at their location and to me uh you know as as a a person that's interested in doing the right thing and making sure we we don't cause more problems than than um we already have these tanks would you know that the affluent would be collected from this tank taken to a wastewater treatment facility and it would be taken care of in a proper manner and with the in-ground system uh they could have serious problems and i'm in a wet year and to avoid that problem that would be seemed to me be better to have these tanks that where we knew the uh sewerage was going to go to a treatment facility but i don't remember the exact number of the tank itself i believe the new if the larger tank that they may have to purchase i believe i recall it was around twenty two thousand dollars for the tank itself brian's nodding so i don't remember the percentage um it's some percentage of that twenty two thousand that they would have to pay every year um in order to get the surety from the bank it's essentially an insurance policy that they would have to pay every year thanks for that information uh senator rogers and senator campion yeah so i'm i'm still having an issue with the whole financial surety language we don't require people with in-ground systems to have that same sort of insurance and their system could fail just as well as a pump out uh system could fail and just make two other points um we don't require municipalities even those having with cso's having spills of raw sewage they don't have to have an insurance bond and financial surety to make sure that they're uh compliant with the standards i just i think it's a standard that we don't apply to a whole bunch of other systems and my only hope is that when they pump out those tanks it's not going to a wastewater facility that has a cso and overflow problems yeah that would be bad uh peter could you tell us a little more about the uh bonding and and why anything about the history of that and why you require or do you are you proposing to get rid of that that bonding so i can't speak to the intent of the legislature at the time it was passed it's not our requirement you asked you know asked us to ensure it was part of the permanent process um we don't you know lots of instances where we there is a financial assurance component um we are the holders of that device so that we can make sure that the cleanup of something happens in the instance that uh the work doesn't move forward that's not the case here it from our perspective it would be cleaner uh if if this and this is what we originally suggested and i everything else senator already said about our meeting and wherever going is is true uh we would support striking that entire section of the law to not no longer require the financial surety for any of the tank holders because we don't think it would really come into play as being necessary to ensure that uh we can uh have a functioning system and we can use you know both the the contract that's required as part of the permit and our normal uh compliance and enforcement work to make sure that that you know that there isn't an environmental and public health risk so just to make sure i'm understanding commissioner walk are you are you saying we could strike all of sub two or just that is that your is that what you're proposing yes okay um senator camping at his hand up a while ago yeah no this just want to say this sounds fine to me uh i think commissioner walk has answered all of my questions uh it sounds like it's belt and belts and suspenders and and if something were to go awry the protections are there uh and this this is just holding folks up um you know from similar to what uh uh senator hardy was saying folks are trying to do the right thing they need a new tank and to get all of this done and make the situation better it kind of seems seems to make sense unless there's something i'm missing where all of a sudden you know this bond or whatever we were talking about this financial security would come back not being there would come back to haunt us but it doesn't sound like that's the case so i i feel comfortable if it would be helpful we could brian could talk about what would happen if the system were out of compliance and what we might require of sort of closing in and decommissioning the system as a way of saying it we're not just going to let them operate for 20 years and therefore pay out of that financial surety we would you know so brian you want to talk a little bit about that just to sort of wrap up that'd be great back end piece looks like bearer uh one one point to be made is we have we have very very few of these um uh in the state of vermont most of the holding tanks are approved under the exemption sections for the best fixes that i explained earlier so that's that's one point to be made is there's there's very very few of these in existence currently and we don't expect uh too many out in the future just because some of these threshold eligibility requirements and just the requirements in general are fairly onerous so they are a deterrent from really going towards a holding tank project the requirements do through the permitting process require that the owner maintain a waste hauling contract so we have that belt and suspenders they require inspection by a licensed designer periodic inspection and reporting to the to the agency so we feel like there's really some pretty robust requirements already in place that will eliminate the public health and environmental risks associated with the holding tanks if a system were to fail we would investigate the matter and really put a put some mitigating circumstances in place right off the bat to make sure that public health and the environment were being protected and would work with the owner to achieve compliance as quickly as possible these these projects do take time so we would be looking at doing mitigating factors you know if the risk was too great that would be a closure but we would be putting them on a time schedule to remedy the failure as quickly as possible usually within a 15 to 30 day time period is there any long-term you know I someone used the word decommissioning somewhere along the line so say 20 years out for whatever reason the and an operation just ceases to operate what happens then does de c concerned about you know just leaving a tank in the ground sort of forever or does it need to be removed and if so is is the responsibility for that kind of step clear somewhere else in law the the building or structure would require a suitable potable water supply and wastewater system for occupancy so the issue really becomes that the building would not be usable until those facilities were available for its for its safe use so that that really becomes the issue as the building isn't it won't have a potable water supply or a wastewater system so it would jeopardize the ability to have that building in use great well thanks so the commissioner's proposal and it's been floated out I don't know if he said it first but the whole idea of removing a session that seems unnecessary seems more attractive to me than sort of jury rigging in a calendar day count you know that basically catches up and addresses one situation without naming the situation explicitly I don't know how others think about it I think at at this stage of our game that we're in and that would be the simplest way to do it is just to extract number two out of that section A and I think we you know if both committees agree on this we might be able to even add it to the budget bill I've spoken with chairman Kitchell senator Kitchell in regards to this and so we might be able to do it as part of the budget bill or an amendment to the budget bill because it it does pertain to money in a roundabout way so you know I don't know any other vehicle that we that we have where we could address this unless you guys Chris if you folks in natural have something to add it to we do have another bill on the inter basin water bill but the budget is a sure vehicle to be on and although it's my preference not to put policy things into the well sometimes it's a useful place to go that is an issue especially given how short we are on time at this point this session um Sarah Hardy thank you I just wanted to add that I would be fine getting rid of all of sub two the reason that I asked Michael to draft it as a sort of narrow exemption was to attempt to get a compromise between our two committees but if we're all on the same page and all feel that getting rid of that paragraph makes sense I would I'd seem based on my conversations with DEC and Commissioner Walk and his team it seems like it does make sense that there are other there are other belts and suspenders already in there for making sure that these tanks are compliant so thanks so one last quick question to our council is I don't know Mr. Rady if you see if we strike two are there do anything come does anything come to mind from your perspective looking out at it from our sort of that we would want to consider you know like are we failing to take anything else into account or this seems like a surgical edit and we're fine we have enough other surety built in and enough other ways that eliminating this seems like a good solution I'm having like a little domestic issue going on right here school is fun right Michael yeah so the legislative history of this requirement I didn't draft the statute that created 1979 but when a universal jurisdiction went into play the reason that it was kept was to provide a disincentive for holding tanks but if you look at this entire section there's significant disincentive throughout the section and I don't think it's going to lead to increased permanent underneath the section okay well that was you know sort of behind my question was once upon a time it was a policy expression like in order to not have development in places that weren't going to allow for an ingrown system we weren't allowing holding tanks was my impression it was one way to help guide what kind of development happened so doesn't apply here but there are other questions from other committee members let's see so senator start you're on approach do you want to bring this basically just striking sub two to the appropriations committee directly on behalf of the two committees yes I would be more than glad to to do that I I did bring this up to the committee last week that we might want to present this to them once we had this joint meeting and if you folks and and natural agreed with it that I'd be back with it and hopefully tomorrow maybe even late today we're going to wrap that bill up in approach so I'll bring it to the committee today and if they if they don't you know Jane doesn't want to add this because it is a particular committee language jurisdiction I think maybe a letter from your committee would also be helpful and if that doesn't happen as a backup to that if Jane says well maybe we shouldn't add it in here but if you want to do it on the senate floor we could do it as a joint amendment to the approach bill on the floor from both committees which is you know ten it's all we need six other votes to get it done so but I don't think this is a positive issue it's not a negative issue we're trying to do and I would think that you know it would it'll go into the bill but I'll I'll make sure of that today and if you guys from your committee could send a letter to Jane approving it and and backing it that would be most helpful okay so I'm I'm seeing a screen full of faces mostly I'm guessing everyone's in agreement um both committees to do it go bigger I am okay great you know I think you know my concern originally was just that there was the that the 28 day trigger was jury rigged right for good reason narrowly narrowly drafted not to sweep in more things but it seems like a better a better edit to address the situation broadly not just you know sort of picking off field days as an exception right can I make comments senator bray yeah senator rogers well in my perspective it's not only a financial burden for someone like the field day but it sounds like a financial burden for anyone to have to come up with that bond if their best fix is is the is the holding tank and like we said there are tons of other provisions in the law that would if it fails it's a failed system if they don't maintain it and it overflows it's a failed system so DC has methods to deal with that the you know my only sort of ongoing concern I guess we would just have to watch and see and DC help us which is um if somehow removing this disincentive made more people say you know actually I would like to do this project and I'm going to propose a holding tank for it rather than so that we might see new projects coming forward I know there's a best fix so could ask the commissioner mr redmond if they feel like removing this disincentive might end up creating the unintended consequence of people trying to go to new new projects withholding tanks it's still not an easy process even without this um so that was an actual question I don't know commissioner what has a response or mr redmond since you see these kinds of permit applications um yeah I would defer to Brian and his team for that answer yeah as I said before we've very very few of these uh permitted under 1979 um in the state uh Addison county being one of maybe two or three in total uh the bulk majority of the uh holding tanks permitted our best fixes for failed systems under uh so I would not uh foresee the elimination of the surety resulting in a widespread uh proliferation of of holding tank usage for wastewater systems there's plenty of disincentives in place we really do look for the soil based solution in almost all cases um and try to minimize exposure to pathogens um through going through the the soil based solution so I yeah I would not see this as a a pathway to proliferation of holding tanks okay so to follow center star your suggestion if Michael could redraft the language as a in budget form then we could send that as part of our committee letter over to senator kitchell and then she would know that the two committees are working hand in hand to get it done yeah that's fine with me um is that something you could do Michael this morning or before we we're going to meet uh right after the senate for so um if jane had that um as early as possible give her a chance to to look it over and think about questions um anything else from anybody I'd like the ag committee to stay on were you gonna have a meeting chris um nope we were uh you know we were we were gonna have this meeting after the floor so we're we're a step ahead already um so I wanted to check in with Michael is that something you'll be able to send to the committee like by 10 o'clock or something yep I can okay so then let me check with the natural committee so I'll write a letter between now and then and once I get it and I'm guessing everyone everyone in the committee is fine with sending that over to our probes okay thanks yep uh any anything else from anybody if not uh thank you commissioner and mr redmond thank you michael and all you committee members I'd like to have the ag committee stay on we have another issue that we should discuss so thank you chris and yep resources thank you guys I really appreciate it all of you see you all right so um golly if we get this done won't it be wonderful yeah but anyhow uh getting back to a different issue uh in the um the ag agency wanted to be able to redirect funds from from uh one fund to another fund and redistribute it and yesterday well I brought this up to to jane last week and not much was said except for you know um you're always you're always trying to keep all the money with ag or something to that effect but anyways well yesterday um I I don't recall which agency uh request came in but they wanted the ability to reallocate funds to other areas within their jurisdiction and uh all all hell broke loose about doing that um in the committee and the main reason was uh jane said that at the end of the day uh you know we've all been given ample what we felt was ample time or all the different departments were given ample time to get rid of the money and the money is going to be all gone and what happens and they were planning on or she was thinking or she thinks a year ahead of most of us I guess but her thinking has been and finally told us was that what if all heck breaks breaks loose late this fall and in some place in a school and the colleges or in a community and we need a few million dollars to to correct that if we allocate or allow to these different agencies to reallocate the money within their agencies the money would be all gone and there wouldn't be any money to have in a kitty to be able to put out where these hot spots might show up so anyways uh the committee didn't allow that to to happen so I I don't think I'm going to bring it back up again today but I don't think that's gonna that part of it's gonna be approved by appropriations and I want you folks uh of course to understand that uh Rose yeah I just have a couple questions um I'm assuming this is pertaining to that email that we got from Michael last week with the language that was put in from the house side is is that about um the redistribution or or prohibit prohibition of redistribution of funds is that is that correct Bobby and Michael yeah that that got it started I think going the the other direction I think it's just related to the appropriations committee's general desire to not have individual agencies reallocating money and to have the money go back to a central funder a central decision maker to reallocate so that all the CRF money is spent by the December 30th deadline and is the central decision maker the joint fiscal committee or who is the central decision maker um it's gonna depend um the language is being revised in senate appropriations so that it is more specific and has um some real detailed guidance on how the money would be spent in any interim um generally it's going to be joint fiscal but if joint fiscal um determines that it's best for it to wait until budget adjustment it's going to wait till budget adjustment okay really they're they're only going to act when prompt action is required um in order to spend the money by any deadline uh and to meet needs or if there's an extension from congress only when that prompt action is needed because of time sensitivity or or I can't remember the other criteria off the top of my head so if there's an extension from congress um on the CRF money then theoretically we could take care of it during the budget adjustment in January or February but it all depends on how long that extension is if it's for 30 days you probably won't be able to get to it in budget adjustment but if it was for seven months or a year then yeah you could get to it okay and then my second question sorry Brian I know you're waiting to ask a question too but is I'm confused Bobby what the it seems to me like we the the Senate just got the budget and you're you're finishing it today is that what I heard you say well either today or tomorrow morning um we've been working on it ever since we we've been working on the budget just like the house has been working on it so the big issues that you're going to be amazed when you see the damn thing um there's very few changes from where what the governor proposed and we've gone through all the agencies uh in their budget says you know we started a week before we all came back and so we've been working on this since the house has basically been working on it so it's all we had to do is really review review the changes that the house has has made to the budget and so there's very few differences um between what the budget what the governor proposed and what the house passed and their vote was 140 to four or something I don't know it was one sided well I think some of the policy committees including ours are you know trying to weigh in and we haven't seen any of the language I just the the non-appropriations members of the Senate have not seen the language yet and so I guess I hope there's time for us all to work through it and yeah well Senate appropriations has to voted out by Wednesday in order to meet all the timing requirements in order to get the bill to the governor by September 25th got it okay and you I think you guys should be all getting copies hopefully tomorrow evening maybe but we're going to have a caucus of the whole and and go through all the all the stuff and the changes so if you look at the house version as they passed it I think that part you know will be pretty understandable and and get that uh um get that understood and then the only other thing would be the changes that we made to the house proposals so which are are quite limited and there's not too many not too many new additions like what we're proposing a few but not not bad okay I just know that Education Committee still is discussing some things this out yeah you guys came in with all truck loader stuff yesterday yeah we got more coming Bobby oh god you're gonna have to get a trailer truck I got I got some ideas too yeah we'll load them on the back of Ruth's trailer we can put them in the holding tank Chris yeah put them in the holding tank uh the other issue that I wanted to bring to your attention over the weekend I got the thinking in regards yo always thinking careful in our public hearings and our testimony that we received from a variety of people uh the complaint uh a complaint came up or a concern came up in regards to farmers non-dairy farmers uh having to keep um when not being able to get rid of their animals for slaughter uh because there's they were all plugged up at the slaughter facilities and yet they could apply to the ag agency the farmer could that he's losing money because he can't sell his beef and he's got to keep them around so he's losing money with the beef and at the same time so we're going to pay them to keep their animals but we weren't really promoting or doing anything to increase the slaughter capacity uh to get these animals through and so as I was thinking about doing a bill or an amendment to our bill that would would require the ag agency to pump some money into the slaughter facilities if the slaughter facilities were willing to put additions onto their slaughter house put another line in to to move more animals through and the way it all shook out was that I got Michael involved in it and Minnesota I think it was Michael they put 20 million dollars into upgrading uh their slaughter facilities to get animals through because they ran into the same situation so and they used CRF funds to do it but the ag agency doesn't think they didn't think they would have time to set up a whole separate program but certainly agreed to allow this to happen under their non-dairy portion and so I think Michael we got the numbers from the agency this morning I believe on what kind of what they were going to try to do and promote for the slaughter facilities yep they uh the as you might remember slaughter houses and processors were qualified to apply under the non-dairy program and under working lands and the agency is going to reach out to the slaughter houses and promote and encourage them to apply underneath that program in order to get money pay for expenses for increased capacity or any cost that they occurred incurred uh due to COVID-19 um US Treasury has said that spending money on increased slaughter house capacity uh is a qualified expense if it meets the rest of the requirements of the necessary expense under CRF um and it was Missouri that put 20 million into their their slaughter houses um and so it's it's something that if you want you could encourage the agency to do um to get those people to apply to the program did uh Chris had his hand up and then Ruth so so I think this is an important issue um two questions are you talking about adding this to the budget where we're already making the tweaks that we've been working on with house act uh we haven't got it they the the agency has agreed to do this they said it's within their jurisdiction to do it without any kind of legislation but I thought we of course I was thinking we were going to be allowed to move some money around and there would be some real dollars there that we could get rid of that would that would really make a difference next year you know the slaughter facilities would have been large and and uh increased their production so it wouldn't only help fix right now but it would work out so it'd be good for the future but we can't move the money around and and uh so they can do whatever they can promote this right now with the laws that we have in place so we haven't got to do anything with legislation I just wanted to mention it to you that that um it kind of fell apart really by not being able to move the money around in the agency because there's going to be some money left and I think in the dairy part uh I think we we were short we thought we were short in dairy but yeah um we've still got a couple hundred or more that haven't even applied yet so well we were the five of us were right but that's a little solid so um my question is we did we are about to give them flexibility to move between programs and the slaughter facilities are eligible through the working lands stuff right program am I right so you're just saying we're not going to then have another option in December if the feds extend it we won't have the chance then to do something exciting but but until then we do have some opportunities that correct well yes we have some opportunities but I don't we aren't going to be allowed to move money from the dairy to non-dairy uh and and all that so I don't think but say more about that because I thought that was the whole point of what we've been working on with house ag and you were putting it in the budget so is this there's a slaughter scene but there's also now are you saying that we're not going to be able to do the the solution we've worked on with carolin and everybody I don't believe that I know yesterday that got shot down uh the other agency that was trying to do that got shot down and I'm gonna I'm gonna try again today because they were the committee feels that there should be a pot of money sitting there in case we have a something flare up uh after we've gone home to to take care of it as as of course we're going to be into November all of our dates can get moved to November 15th or whatever they already have they already have the flexibility to move between don't they I don't have the flexibility to move non-dairy to dairy right well we got we have got to fight for that Bobby because we're not talking about December we're talking about October and so it's really a different dynamic than I think perhaps jane is understanding well great that we worked really hard to make sure that this money would be would be available in October for farmers that need it and and I just this makes no sense to me we need to be able to to allow that to happen at least until November 15th very least hey mark your committee already left well the dates will get moved to November 15th so all of October's uh expenses will be allowed to be in and then farmers should get their receipts from their sale of milk uh uh by November 15th uh so that will qualify them to uh you know to get in the only thing is after we added in that we would move we could move money in between them times and and uh uh I don't think I don't think they're gonna buy that but well especially because yeah it's their approach committee we'll make them buy it Bobby come on this is why we pay you it's easy well I told you I hadn't given up yeah this is really concerning to me Bobby I just telling you what we did this is not I'm just telling you what happened yesterday and but anyways um so the as far as helping the slaughter facilities um that that is all in place and they were going to start working on that to promote that uh today um should should we I'm happy to reach out to Jane and to Tim it's there I mean there's no reason not to I don't want to step on your toes but is there a reason not to Sarah McDonald's we are way more fun in senate ag but um our joint committee is over but we always love having people in our tiny room I've been out chasing cows so um this is a good a good cooling off screen um no if you can talk to Tim or anybody go go for it because all the help I can get I need I'll tell you um so are there any Bobby are there any other situations similar to this in other areas meaning not this agriculture but other areas where people are trying to hold on to money and move around yeah that that's where I got the jive yesterday that it's going to get rough sledding because um it was a different agency I don't know if it was human services or or one of them that was in with uh reallocating of funds and and uh that that didn't go very well so they wanted to reallocate but they were told not to yeah yeah they wanted to reallocate funds within their different areas of jurisdiction that funds were set up for and and uh they and we were going to run into a time crunch uh with a slaughter facilities because ag couldn't set up a program quick enough to just do uh slaughter people I'm not understanding what what these are two separate issues but on the slaughter issue why don't what's wrong with them just going through working lands they can but there's gonna be enough money there uh to you know it's going some of those slaughter facilities it could take a serious amount of money to put in a whole new line uh to do slaughter or add on a room to uh to the cops and in that do they run three shifts usually no I don't believe so I don't think any of them run three I think some of them run 12 uh 12 hours shifts there you know there isn't a lot of people that like working in those facilities yeah I understand what the ag agency is going to do they don't have money for this so what they're just well they've got 8.6 in working lands to disperse and then they've got uh in the non-dairy was there five or six million there well my understanding from the the testimony we got was that expanding a slaughter facility is a massive project that will not be done by December 30th so no that's what is Michael Michael are you still on well what what they can do though like for facilities like that is they can expend the money they they can expend the money on coolers equipment uh all these things as as long as that money is expended they're okay even for future usage that's what Michael dug up yesterday and and we passed that on to Steve and and Abby over Allison over at the ag agency so is there any other issues that anyone to bring up so it's too late for us to buy Thomas's dairy right boy that was a shocker to hear that was going down yeah that must have hit hard in the community right Brian it did there's I don't know how many employees 30 or 40 I think so yeah not not very good at all um the only question I had and I guess I'm as disappointed as the other four uh with the decision here if there isn't another event where does that money go it's nice to have a pot of money that's you know on a shelf somewhere that you can use but if it doesn't happen what happens to it and how much are we talking about that might be left over from dairy non dairy in the forest I mean we're talking millions and millions of dollars or is it a hundred thousand dollars that's what I'm not clear of well forestry had 1.5 1.6 left but they still veto money to do the administering so say they had they had 20 percent of their total allotment say left over that will go to a kitty um you know if we end a million bucks if if we end up at 20 percent it's going to be you know we had like 30 million I hope the hell it isn't 20 percent I don't want six million dollars being reverted to the UI fund and that's where it's going to go well that's where it's going to go is to the UI fund to beat that back up so if we keep getting unemployed people there'll be ample money to um you know to have there but uh I I mean I would I thought that it would be logical if we had 30 million in three programs that we'd be able to move that from one program to the other as long as it stayed within that jurisdiction yeah but I know yesterday it didn't go too good but will when I present ours today we'll see how it goes but I just wanted you folks to know that what happened yesterday okay uh any anything else I don't I don't think I have have anything else I just hope and I hope we get this squared away with the holding tank business and put to rest so your people were all happy Ruth with that language on the tank well I mean I I think what they would ultimately like is to not have to get a new tank but um well that's that's just kind of tough I think at this point at least this makes it more affordable for them to be able to do so um and I think that after all the gymnastics we've gone through well I will make sure that they understand that they've been taken care of well you know they have a sub I think that was a 7 000 gallon tank they put in last last year with monitors and flow charts and all of that so but anyways let's work on getting that done and and we'll get this other thing done up uh anything else Michael that you had for us no right now would you want to repeat what we found out about the slaughter facilities you being able to use this money to purchase things as long as they can purchase the things before the end of the year they're all good to go right right so the agency for all the applicants under dairy and non-dairy have been interpreting the economic harm definition to include the cost caused by COVID and expenses so for example some of the cheese makers want to go more online and the cost to that and if they can incur those costs before December 1st then they're they're becoming eligible same thing with the slaughter houses if they can prove some eligibility or expenses that that are eligible underneath the CARES Act requirements and incur them before December 1st then they are they're being awarded so they can apply for expansion if it's a necessary expenditure under the CARES Act and the money incurred before December 1. Yep well thank you Michael are there any other questions if not we'll see you guys at 9 30 I guess on the Senate floor so. Mr. Chair are we meeting any time the rest of the week? Well we may be if something comes up that we should meet on and if any of you think of any reason why we should meet you know let me know and we'll we'll have a meeting. Okay I'm just trying to plan believe it or not a sine wave in the morning and I didn't want to have a conflict. Yeah well we'll be thinking about your waving and if we need you call you on the phone. I probably shouldn't have admitted that in while we're live but I'm an honest guy. Okay well thanks a lot everybody and we'll see you in just a few minutes on that. Okay thank you Brian.


Simple Show Foundation explains Schultz von Thun's four sides model. This is Tim. On Sundays, he likes relaxing with his girlfriend, Sandra. But sometimes the mood changes very quickly, and they suddenly start fighting, without even knowing why. Tim wishes he had an instruction manual for these situations, like a kind of checklist. And he's not the only one. Many psychologists have spent a lot of time studying communication. They have developed several different models. For example, Schultz von Thun's well-known four ears model. This is designed to help with communications problems, to better analyze and solve them. This is just what Tim needs. Does it mean he has to grow a new set of ears? No. The model was originally named the message square, and is also called the four sides model. The theory states that every message contains four different pieces of information. These are factual information, a self-revelation about the speaker, a message about the relationship between the speaker and the listener, and an appeal. Every message is intended to have a certain effect. Usually we only consciously convey one piece of information, but all the other elements of the message are subconsciously received by the listener. And he then decides how he chooses to perceive them. Tim's statement, the window is open, could lead to problems between him and his girlfriend. For him, the appeal is the most important part. Close the window. But the other facets are also important. I don't want to do it. I'm too tired today. My girlfriend likes to help me. She knows that I'm stressed out. Sandra hears the appeal, but she interprets the other facets quite differently. She hears, I'm lazy, and my girlfriend is my servant. The factual information is not actually very important for either of them. Why does everything have to be so complicated, thinks Tim? There are many factors that can disrupt communication. Tones and gestures, biased expectations and attitudes, or fears and concerns, can all lead to misunderstandings. Personal history can also play an important role. So what's the solution for this problem? Talking. The miracle cure is called metacommunication. Communication about communication. But you have to be brave to face self-criticism and to share your feelings. Questions like, what is our relationship like? And why did I answer back? Can help here. Awesome. And even if they do fight again, Tim doesn't have to worry. He now has a better understanding of lots of problems and can handle them more thoughtfully. Now he's looking forward to the next weekend with his girlfriend even more.


February 12th is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who invented the concepts that we now call evolution. We are here at a scientific workshop sponsored by the National Human Genome Research Institute where some of the world's leading geneticists are discussing the genetic factors that cause disease. Let's see if they think whether Charles Darwin's discoveries are still relevant to today's research. Yeah, absolutely. Very much so. Darwin was really a pioneer person in terms of telling us how we are all related and not just human beings across the planet, but how we are actually related to things that we didn't think we were related to. Practiced every day in clinical medicine. He provided the first, I should say, synthesizing view of modern biology, which in his words were survival of the fittest, but that wasn't the only one, but really in trying to say that structure begets function. And he gave us a reason as to how that function comes about over time. I think the coolest thing is that he tackled something that everyone assumed was true and everyone assumed that species were relatively fixed over time and had been so for many, many, many generations. What he showed is that there's a spectrum of difference among different species and that that spectrum changes over time. So things are constantly changing and shifting and the power of biology is based on those changes in DNA and genes which we see in different species and in health and disease every day. His discovery really set the stage for what we are currently doing in terms of understanding human relationship, human history, and in our relationship to lower organism around the world. His theory and thinking is very, very relevant not only to the study of biology and understanding biology, but also in understanding human disease. The first, which I don't think we think about, but we use his name all the time, which is Darwin's concept of natural selection and is often simplified into survival of the fittest. So what Darwin figured out is by looking at agricultural populations, he realized what breeders were doing, whether it was breeding chickens or cows or pigeons, that the same principles applied in nature as well. And in terms of the breeders in agriculture, they obviously had a particular characteristic they were interested in selecting and what nature does naturally is select for fitness, leaving more babies to the next generation. The second thing that he did was to posit a theory, the theory of natural selection, as a way of explaining what comes through evolution and that's where there has been a lot of both debate and controversy that is what is the evidence, what is the nature of the evidence, who is fit, who is unfit, and how do these mechanisms play out? And we now finally are getting to see the actual mechanism by which that information is encoded and passed on and really understanding the basis of heritability at a much finer level. He did not know about genes. He proposed a model that essentially predicted and is entirely consistent with the existence of genes, but he didn't know about that. And that's the beauty of it, because his observations of nature led him to predict a model that's perfectly consistent with genes, but he didn't have to know about it to predict it. And that's the strength of evolution, is that once you do know about genes, you put those two pieces together, they fit perfectly together, strongly reinforce each other, and the genes provide the biological mechanism for Darwin's ideas. So what the genome project did is it laid down black and white or actually on a browser screen, because that's how we actually use it today, in black and white the differences and the similarities across every species in every gene. And we can now just look at that in black and white and say, here it's the same, here it's different, and understand right on a screen what's the same and what's different, and how evolution is making some things change over time, and how evolution is making some things stay exactly the same. There have been regions of the genome identified, where you can just look at variation in the DNA sequence and find an imprint of selection in the past. This is particularly so for genes that are implicated, for example, with immune response and other traits. There's even imprints of what we think are selection that occurred relatively recent during the Middle Ages, for example, resistance against the plague, for example, in Europe. There's certainly the signatures of evidence that certain types of mutations have been advantageous, certain types of mutations have been deleterious, and there's also evidence in different places of balancing selection. If there is a particular DNA change that was advantageous, then it drags with it a lot of other DNA changes around it. So what we call a haplotype? So if you see in the region of the genome that there is one haplotype which is much longer, all hung together, much longer than you'd expect from looking elsewhere in the genome, that's evidence that has been selection around that lockers. And now I think the task is to try and take that evidence for change, to try and understand how that leads to the adaptive changes that we know have happened in human societies for long periods of time. And that's a large task, but that's the kind of biological challenges I think we relish. Darwin had very incomplete, in fact, very old-fashioned views of where variation arose from, how that variation was maintained, in fact, molecularly how it was maintained, or how it was maintained by organisms. Variation comes ultimately from mutations, and there's many different kinds of mutations as we've heard at this meeting. Single base changes which are just errors in a copying from when the gametes, sperm and exels are created. There's also more complicated mutations which are basically whole bits of chromosome that are not really replicated very well. So DNA changes at a relatively fixed rate every time it's transferred from parent to child. That's normal variation, normal mutation rate, and that mutation rate increases the diversity of all species, and in a few instances when it occurs, in a crucial part of the DNA, causes a disease. One area in which Darwin's influence was not felt, I would say for about a century, and it's only now many are talking about, is, for example, the use of the theory of evolution in the context of human illness, health and disease. So as a practicing clinical geneticist, one of the biggest challenges I face every day is figuring out how to interpret sequence variation in patients and understand if that sequence variation causes the disease in that patient. So what that means is when I see a DNA change, I need to know did that cause the problem in the patient, or is it just a coincidence? And every day when I analyze those variations, I use evolutionary principles to understand how that change may relate to disease, because what the theory of evolution teaches us is that if a particular piece of a gene is really, really important, then that sequence will be similar or the same in many different species. So I can look across species from all the sequence data in many different animals and derive from that an idea about whether that's an important DNA change, or whether it's unimportant and isn't related to what the disease is in my patient. I think the types of studies that we're doing now have only very recently become possible, and it's still very much in the early phases of the research. Because we know from studies, for example, of the resemblance between relatives, in particular from twin studies, that a lot of the variation in disease also has a genetic component to it. And in fact, for diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which I work on, in fact, the majority of the variation in risk in the population is actually due to genetic factors. So by trying to get a handle on these genetic factors, we can understand the biology and ultimately that may lead to treatments, for example, new drugs. So it can give us hints about how to manage or treat that patient, as well as it can give us the ability to predict the occurrence of that disease in future generations. There's a lot of things, a lot of power that gives us and our patients to understand those changes and what they mean for disease and health. Oh, absolutely. Very slowly on a genetic level. But in some cases, you know, we see evolution and action not in, you know, sort of real-time changes to our genetic patterns. But we can also see things sometimes exposed by the radical changes in the environment that we have introduced to ourselves in the past century. For example, the much more hygienic environment in which we now live is thought to, you know, provide perhaps a basis by which autoimmune inflammatory diseases might, you know, represent inappropriate responses where once they were useful responses. Oh, we see tremendous evidence of evolution. We see tremendous evidence of selection. You know, again, our ability to adapt to different environments is really, again, critical. And for example, if you look at things like Lysa fever in West Africans, you do see, in East Africans, you do see evidence of natural selection there, where there's selection for specific genes or specific gene variants that help protect people against that devastating disease. Again, because that's the environment where it was found, you know, sequel cell is another one, you know, which have those evidence there in terms of protection against malaria. Yes. Every species is constantly evolving. And what the key is is not whether we are evolving. The question is the degree to which selection is acting. And that was one of Darwin's key insights. The selection is the key because DNA changes. And those changes only matter if it changes the effect that it has on your health and your survival. And so selection is the key. And when we see a person with a disease that has a genetic cause, that's selection operating today on that individual and us as a species. I think the aspect of Darwin that it's cool in the sense and what school depends clearly on one's age is the fact that he was ignored as long as he was ignored. And I think it's cool in the sense that we currently in today's world where we are all very impatient and scientists want a lot of immediate recognition for their work that we should be patient. Perhaps it takes a century to be understood.


Okay, so I think we're out of time. Thank you Quintana, thank you very much. Doesn't matter. Hello. Okay folks, can we bunch up from the sides to let more people sit down? Okay folks, we're starting the next presentation. So I'm going to introduce my good friends, Magnus and Bjorn, and they're going to be talking about AFXTP. Can we have some quiet from the room please? Alright, let's get going. So my name is Bjorn Tobal, and this is my partner in crime, Magnus Carlson. We're from Intel, as you can see from the nice blue. And we're here to tell you a bit about what AFXTP is. What's that? Is this better? Better? Okay. Okay, so you missed the word from our sponsor, but we'll skip that right. Okay, so why are we doing this? So if you ask most developers or network application developers today, you have to pick a platform and you have to pick an API. Most people say Linux and BSD sockets. So why is that? Well, it supports a lot of features. There it works. People are familiar with it. So that's the pick. So say that this developer wants to develop a DPI application. That's the packet inspection application. And it goes to what's provided by the kernel, which is the AVE packet socket layer. After a while he realized that, okay, I'm not getting the performance that I like. So what can I do about it? Throw more cores at it, which is, I mean, we as Intel would love that, but it's not for everyone. So, I mean, it might not even be possible to throw more hardware at the problem. So the typical solution then is to go to a hardware vendor. For example, someone that provides a specialized NIC or some kind of specialized hardware. And the problem here is that usually with these hardware, you get a proprietary SDK. So you have to change your application. And if you want to try another hardware, you have to change the application once again. They're usually hard to use. They usually lack a lot of features that Linux has, but this specific hardware doesn't have. But then there's software solutions as well. For example, DeepDK and there's PF Ring and Netmap. They're really fast, but they're not really integrated into Linux. So again, it requires you to rewrite your application. And the biggest problem here is that it's not really integrated into Linux. So if you want to use the feature from Linux, then you have to reimplement them yourself in your software. And that's not optimal doing things twice. So the problem statement is, so can we take the ease of use and features of Linux and the software and combine it with the performance from here? And let's see. So what we're proposing is a new socket application. What we're proposing is a new address family called XDP. And it's a socket layer. So I can view it as the user space part of XDP. And we just had a great introduction to XDP from our previous speaker, so I won't dwell into that. The solution is free from system calls. So the transmit path and receive path has zero system calls. We also provide a new kind of allocator that if you modify the device driver and use this allocator, you'll get true zero-copys mantics all the way out to use alone. So that means that the NIC will DMA the frame out to memory in the use space application. Okay. If you do not use this allocator and use an unmodified driver, you will still get a copy, but pretty good performance. Anyway, the last thing is that we do not expose any hardware details to the user application. So instead we're exposing virtual hardware descriptors that are being translated in the kernel to... So the virtual hardware descriptors are being translated to hardware descriptors in the kernel. Yes. All right, one thing to note. So if you're using the zero-copy mode, then your hardware has to support hardware steering. So for example, we have two sockets receiving two separate flows. Then in order to use zero-copy out to use alone, you must be able to steer the flows. But Magnus will tell me more about this later. Okay, so what else? Our goal is to hit 40 gig for large packets, 40 gigabit per second, and for 64-byte packets we're hoping for 25 gigabits per second. All right, so from a Linux perspective, why is this good? Well, we get a new socket layer that's fast, and we're hoping to be closer to deep decay or just some percent off. You get out-of-the-box support for all network devices that's already there in Linux. So Linux support a whole lot of devices. What else? It states that XDP is required, which is not entirely true. To get the best performance, we require XDP, but it can fall back to a mode that's based on SK Buffs instead of XDP, and it's so you can use the same application interface for all the device drivers, but some device drivers will have better performance, obviously. Okay, I'll wait for the future work for later slides. Okay, so from a deep decay perspective, why should deep decay care about this? Well, say that you implement a promo driver based on AFXDP, then you can still use your deep decay applications without any changes. But instead of having the device driver in use space, you let the kernel handle the hardware, which is honestly, the kernel is pretty good at that. So the goal here is to have, of course there will be a performance hit, but we're aiming for 10 percent, and for some application, that might be good enough. As a follow-up, another good thing is if we leave all the user space drivers aside, then we can actually use deep decay inside containers, which is not possible today, at least not in an easy way. And another thing is that you don't have to re-implement things, like scheduling and back off in your user space application, because the kernel can do this. We support, for example, a pole syscall, so we can first do bicep hauling, and then if we don't want to do bicep hauling anymore, we just back off using the pole syscall. So again, maybe the goal is to, if deep decay is using this driver, then deep decay can be seen as a really good packet processing library, which currently is as well. We think AFX to P could work really good in conjunction with deep decay. All right. So enough talk. Here's the code. So you start off by creating a socket. You allocate some buffers using your favorite allocator, and the buffer is where the framed data will be DMA to. You pass this buffer pointer to the kernel, so you register a memory to the kernel. You create the virtual descriptor rings, the Rx and Tx for ingress and egress. And then you bind the socket to a certain interface. So you state, okay, I want to bind this ifindex and a specific queue in the nick. And then in this example here, I'm using bicep hauling. So I read messages from the ring. I process them, send them out. So again, I can put the pole syscall in there if I want to back off. Right. So again, so where does X to P fit within AFX to P? So my plan was to do some introduction to X to P here, but again, I'll skip that. So what we've done is that we've taken the redirect action from X to P and said that you cannot, on top of redirecting your frames to other net devices, you can redirect to an AFX to P socket as well. So it's just another target for redirect. And some somewhat crazy idea we had here is that maybe we can do descriptive rewriting from X to P as well. So we could from X to P support another descriptive format, for example, a virtual net. And then we could do virtual machine networking using the X to P socket layer. What else? Right now the current patch that only consumes the frames and the received frame that are being redirected to a socket is consumed, but we'll need to be able to copy the frame to a socket and then pass it on to the stack because then we will have TSP dump could be able to use that and have a much faster TSP dump than the current AF packet based one. And also I've been discussing with Jesper down here about doing load balancing from X to P programs so we can receive your frame and then load balancing it over multiple sockets. Right. Yep. And just a few notes on the operation mode. So if a driver is unmodified and doesn't ever have X to P support, we support something called X to P SKB, which is a mouthful. But that means that you can still run your X to P programs it'll be slow, obviously, or as slow as the SKB path is. But it will work. So you can use that on any device driver or any net device driver and a net dev device from the kernel. If the device driver has support for X to P, then you use the mode in the middle. And that's still copy, but it's much faster than the first one. And finally, there's the modified driver that's using the zero-copy allocation scheme and that's the fastest one. All right. So I think it passed on to Magnus. So how do we do this zero-copy stuff now? If you look at the picture on the left-hand side there, that's the classical non-zero-copy case. In that case, the TX and ARC descriptors of the harder ring is just mapped to the kernel. They're not visible to user space. Same thing with the packet buffer, only visible to the kernel. What Linux does then is just copy out the packets into user space. And with the TX and ARC descriptors, it just translates those into some hardware agnostic format that's in user space. And that's a good thing. I mean, operating systems, it's about hardware abstractions, security, robustness, isolation. You get that here. So we want to keep that in our zero-copy solution. So in the zero-copy solution, we do not expose TX and ARC descriptor harder rings into user space. They're still translated by the Linux kernel into some format, which looks different than other sockets, but it's still a hardware agnostic format. And it's going to be secure and isolated and stuff. But the key difference here is that we take the packet buffer and map it straight up into user space. So packets from the NIC are mapped by DMAGES straight into user space. If you have two applications here, two processes, note that the RX and TX descriptors are never, ever shared between these two processes. Packet buffers on that can be shared. By default, they're not shared. But if you like shared memory, there's nothing that hinders you to share the packet buffers. Of course, you create a huge false domain. The other process might actually pollute your data and so on. But yeah, you chose it. That's what you get. But it's possible, but never with the descriptors there. Okay, so security and isolation, that's very important. So what are the requirements here? We make sure that user space can never crash the kernel or another process. And also that it cannot read or write any kernel data, which is, of course, you have to note. And you cannot read or write any packets from any other process. So what do you need in order to do this? Let's say you have two processes at this point, A and B, and all your traffic goes in through a single interface. So you have to split up the stream of traffic to process A and process B. And if they have like 80 address X, 80 address Y, then you actually have to use some hardware steering in order to steer this packet. That's a requirement for untrusted applications, multiple untrusted applications, where the flows come in from the same port. Because otherwise, I mean, you couldn't just take that flow and just push it up into a single untrusted application and have that spread it out, because then you would be able to see any packet and modify any packet. So that's not a good thing. But fortunately, I mean, since like 10 years ago, most NICs actually support classification. And if you look at NICs today, I mean, they're becoming more and more advanced and can do more and more stuff. You can even download XDP programs into network stuff. So they're becoming more and more flexible. I think this is a problem. But there's always going to be, in some cases, something where you can't perform the classification in hardware. And in that case, you have to use the XDP SKB mode or the XDP driver mode, which copies out the data into user space. And then what we want to achieve is having then the classification being done in XDP. So you download the XDP program, it does the classification. Of course, it's going to be slightly slower, but still a lot better than before. Okay, let's look at some numbers. So we have this experimental setup here. It's the latest RC that came out Wednesday, I believe. No, Tuesday, it was even. It's just on some Broadwell server here. We use only two cores for these simple microbenchmarks here. And the app runs on one core. And then I know this is completely branded, but TX and RX runs on the same core. Of course, that's not good. But we're going to fix that. It was just a faster way to get to this point. TX, of course, should run on its own core, but it doesn't at this point. So they will compete, as you will see in some of the benchmarks, where we use both TX and RX. We want to use one cube pair. It's a 40 gigabit 4-tool, Nick. And we use an X-Yellow generated blasting it just for 40 gigabits a second full traffic all the time. We have three microbenchmarks. We have RX drop, which just receives the packet, doesn't look at the data, just drops it. TX push is kind of the opposite. It has pre-computed TX packets. Just try to send them out as quickly as possible. Only RX, only TX. And L2 forward is then receive the packet, swap the MAC header, send it out again. So this actually does touch the data. And we have four different columns here. We have AF packet B3 that exists already in Linux. And then we have the three modes that we have introduced. And the first thing that you can see is that, well, even this XDP-SKB mode would work with any, you know, network device. It's like two to five times as fast as the previous fastest one. And we compared B2 to when it's similar to this, so there's nothing special with B3. So that's pretty good. That works on anything.  It's a raw data interface in both cases. I think that's good. And then we have the XDP driver case, which is going to work on any driver with XDP support. And with RX drop, you can see it's like 15 times faster than B3. I think that's also really good. You can see that there are dashes on TX push and L2 forward. So that's one of the challenges we had with this RFC. We didn't reuse the XDP TX NDOs in the driver, but I think that's going to be worked out. So hopefully we'll get to some change those NDOs where we can actually use, have a mode for this even in TX here. So we'll get some numbers here, but the code is not ready. But even better performance you can get with a zero copy one. If you, we start by just looking at TX push. It's about like 22 times what you have here. And RX drop on that hand, it's like 17, or the attack has also done 20 times. But something to note is that, I mean, we had a previous version of this, which we called AF packet V4. It's the new version of AF packet. And it actually had like 40 times the performance. The reason for that is that we have done absolutely no performance optimization on this code. It's just that for functionality. While we're this guy, we actually did some performance optimization. So my guess is that there's lots of low hanging fruit to be had here. So this will definitely increase. We have spent no time on performance optimization. So the goal is to get it at least about 30 million packets per second for these 64 byte packets. But clearly we have, we have work in the optimization area to do. But I think in all these numbers to me look promising. There's lots of future work that we can do. I'm going to say we have nine minutes. Of course, we have to do the performance optimization work. And really something very important. And it's a call to you guys. If you have some real workloads, please try them out. I mean, I had toy micro benchmarks here. It's very different from real workloads and those toy micro benchmarks. If you want to try it out, the RFC is on the mailing list. Just download it and, you know, let us know what works. What doesn't work, please. We really want to make the sys code. This is called on the TXS to get it going. We'll try to get that to get rid of it and also to get TXS of the RX core. Because, I mean, you saw that performance of the L2 forward. I mean, it's limited by RX and TX competing on that core. Of course, that's not good. But we'll fix that. Pakistan is using XTP, talked about. Also, I mean, XTP has metadata support now. It would be nice to tie it into this so you can get metadata. Maybe it's hardware offload stuff. Or it's things that the NIC had already pre-computed for you. And you can, you know, get that up there. Also, I mean, let's say you start an application. You bind to a certain NIC and you bind to a certain QID. Let's say QID 100.  It doesn't have a QID 100. You still want that program to work. So you should be able to emulate that QID by some, you know, copying or whatever. Today, that's not supported. But you really want to be able to have the same program working on every single NIC. You know, independent on many Qs it has. Once we would like to see an XTP redirect to other NET devices, RX path, today you redirect it to the TX path and send it out again. But it makes a lot of sense in certain cases to actually redirect it to the RX path and up upwards again. Today, there's only, at least in the previous corner, I looked in this one. You correct me if I'm wrong just a little bit. You don't have one XTP program for the whole, your whole NIC. You don't have it per QPER. But here, if you can open an AFCTP socket per QID, it makes sense to have an XTP program per QPER. You can do this today. By yes-for-spatch, you can have one XTP program and filter stuff out on QID in your XTP program. But it's still easier from a management point of view to have these as separate programs instead of just one monolithic entity. Somebody talked about, what's another question about XTP support on TX? I mean, yeah, EBPF has TX support, but XTP doesn't have it. But it makes a lot of sense to have it, especially in conjunction with this AFCTP socket. To actually be able to execute an XTP program on the TX path, too. That's not in place today. And the Q's are really single-consumer, single-producer, just to be as fast as possible. But there are use cases where you really want them to be multi-producer, you know, single-consumer or even single-producer, multi-consumer. So we're nice to be able to plug in such a ring into it. We have tried to write the code so that the ring structures are completely abstracted away from the rest of the codes. You can actually plug in different ring structures. So it would be nice if somebody could try this out. And the clone packet configuration, just to be compatible with AF packet. AF packet today, it clones the packet, sends it out to user space, and another one is sent through the stack. We want to be able to do the same thing to, say, support like TCP dump, wire shark, and these things. And in the previous version, we did a TCP dump implementation that took, I mean, only took three, four hours to convert the TCP dump, and we got 20X performance improvement on TCP dump. I think that's decent for four hours of work. So we want to be able to do something similar here. Right? So we've got five minutes. All right, conclude. So we introduced this AFXDP formula on this AF packet V4. It's integrated with XDP. It's basically the user space interface of an XDP program. And the zero copy. We have it up to 20X now. We had it up to 40, but the current patch set is 20. So we hope it can be even better than this. And there's an RC on the net-based mailing list. Please check it out. It has, of course, all the details. This is just an overview. But there are still lots of performance optimization work we need to do. It's there for you to look at, and it's there for just getting the design out for you to comment on. It's not there because it has the greatest performance on Earth yet. We shouldn't start to optimize performance before it's ready, as we all know. But it's very tempting. Of course, and we also think there's lots of exciting XDP extensions to be had in conjunction with this. And if you hit the one, I'm not going to go through this, but there's a couple of people in the audience that we want to thank and more people here. The RFC, you can find here. Right? Questions? Go ahead. If I have to write an application with that, why would I choose one or the other? Yeah, I mean, okay. So you started from scratch. I mean, you made the choice. What should I do? So it depends on if you, for example, had very, very tight performance targets, or you were making an embedded system in an integrated box, then that would probably, you could probably go with DPDK, especially if you had different deployment snares. You wanted your code to run on both the embedded system, a box you wanted to run in the cloud. You wanted to run on somebody's server. Then go with DPDK. You could deploy it anywhere, for example. There are many other things too. I mean, DPDK supports offloading. We don't do that at this point. That's all. And it doesn't have to be an either or choice either. That's a good question. Do you know RDMA? Repeat the question. Okay. Repeat the question. So the question was, why not RDMA? Yeah. It's a good point. We actually started out looking at that. And I think the main thing is that it's so different from what's in the networking stack in terms of it. But I mean, hey, it might be a good fit. But lots of things where it is inspired by RDMA, I mean, you know this. Right. Yeah. And it's, this is my subjective opinion, but it's a bit too much, I'd say, for, for most applications. I mean, RDMA is for all the storage back, things that are too much, but that's, but I mean, it might be right. And I mean, it's RDMA has been around for a long time. So it's really mature as well. But there's like two people waving. Yeah. One more. No. No. Yeah. Yeah. The question is about how you design it, let's take that offline. Sorry. Thank you.


This is Fox Springfield News at 9, first on Fox. It is being an indicator of whether or not you're telling the truth. One technology company seems to think so. Katherine Tlaiz is all the details in tonight's Fox Focus. They say eyes are the window to the soul and one technology company believes they're also the most efficient way to tell if a person is lying in tonight's Fox Focus. A look at this new technology that claims to see your lies. A new form of lie detection claims it can see the truth. There are markers in the eyes that are able to accurately determine if an individual is being deceptive. Neil Harris is the vice president of Converis, the company that created this new technology called Eye Detect. It uses only the eyes to determine if a person is lying. When a human being is being deceptive, that there are these micro dilations of the pupils. It's the extra mental energy that it takes to be deceptive. Eye Detect has been in the work since 2003, only taking 30 minutes to complete. This new testing technology could be faster and more efficient than the old school polygraph. And its creators argue that Eye Detect may have the edge because it isn't influenced by human bias. So by removing the human element, we believe we can make the assessment of credibility far more forensic in nature. Ron Slay is a security consultant who administers polygraph exams. He says in his 40 years of experience, he's seen all forms of deception. He thinks it takes more than a computer system and answering a few questions to detect a lie. You can't automate the human mind. Slay and Harris agree that both Eye Detect and polygraphs can get it wrong sometimes. There will be some false positives and false negatives with Eye Detect as it exists today. But Harris says the beauty of computer algorithms is that they get smarter over time. I trust computers and algorithms far more than I would another human being. Still, the polygraph remains a powerful detection tool, not likely to be replaced any time soon. I think it's the age old argument of man against the machine. Big Time Technology company Apple has taken notice of Eye Detect. Apple purchased the sensor technology that's used to calibrate and read the eyes. Does this mean our iPhones could eventually become handheld lie detectors? Harris says only time will tell. Eye Detect says they hope their new technology will have a positive impact on society and give law enforcement another tool to help achieve justice.