Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Further Accelerates Packet Processing Workloads, Issues Most Robust Platform Release to Date

DPDK’s 18.05 Release, Named ‘Venky’ in Honor of “the Father of DPDK,” Brings Even Broader High-performance Accelerated Network Support to Cloud and Telco Markets

SAN FRANCISCO – June 21, 2018 – Following the move one year ago to the Linux Foundation, the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) project today announced the availability of its milestone DPDK 18.05 ‘Venky’ software release, named after Venky Venkatesan, who was known as “the father of DPDK”. The DPDK project’s 5th major release since joining the Linux Foundation accelerates packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures (including x86, ARM and Power) and supports many enhancements for Encryption, Compression and Packet processing.

Network performance, throughput, and latency are increasingly important for a whole range of applications and implementations such as 5G, Cloud, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV),  wireless core and access, wireline infrastructure, routers, load balancers, firewalls, video streaming, VoIP, SD-WAN, vCPE and more as the ways in which the world communicates rely more and more on fast and stable networks. By enabling very fast packet processing, DPDK makes it possible for organizations to move performance-sensitive applications – like the backbone for mobile networks and voice –  to the Cloud and help create higher performing edge devices.

“The first release of DPDK open source code came out eight years ago; since that time, we’ve built a vibrant community around the DPDK project,” said Jim St. Leger, DPDK Board chair and Data Plane Software Product Marketing Manager, Intel. “We’ve created a series of global DPDK Summit events where the community developers and code consumers gather. The growth in the number of code contributions, participating companies, and developers working on the project continues to reflect the robust, healthy community that the DPDK project is today.”

A true community effort, DPDK 18.05 ‘Venky’ release was built with contributions from over 160 developers, and over 1700 commits across more than 25 organizations.

Key highlights include support for:

• Compression and Cryptography
• Dynamic Memory Scaling – faster application launches
• Event Mode – Hardware or software Event driven scheduler
• Better Virtual Function Management
• Updated driver support for Smart NICs, FPGA and System on Chip (SoCs)
• Future Hardware acceleration of data path, encryption and compression
• More details here – http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/rel_notes/release_18_05.html

In the year since the project joined the Linux Foundation, DPDK has continued to grow its robust community of 19 member organizations and a broad ecosystem of cross-industry partners: spanning hardware vendors, commercial software vendors,  commercial distros and open source organizations, many of which leverage DPDK, such as:

• FD.io/VPP – Fast Data Project  https://fd.io/    
• OPNFV – Open Platform for NFV  https://www.opnfv.org/
• Open vSwitch – Multilayer Open Virtual Switch  http://www.openvswitch.org/
• For up to date list see https://dpdk.org/about/ecosystem

Since mid-2017 when DPDK joined The Linux Foundation, the project has issued five major new releases, hosted five community summits, and established a lab to perform automated performance testing of new patches.

Another exciting development in DPDK is the ability to run on Microsoft Windows. This is available in a draft repository (http://dpdk.org/browse/draft/dpdk-draft-windows/) and will be merged into the main repository in future releases. This expansion in OS support will help to enable new use cases for DPDK.

The DPDK and FD.io communities recently lost a key founding member of the communities: Venky Venkatesan, known as “the father of DPDK,” passed away following a long illness. The DPDK community expresses its utmost condolences to Venky’s family, friends, and extended community. As a token of appreciation, the DPDK 18.05 release has been re-named in Venky’s honor. Venky was an incredibly inspiring man who exuded greatness all around; he will be dearly missed.

DPDK is comprised of a robust community of member organizations committed to enabling accessible fast packet processing to help move the networking industry forward. This includes Gold members Arm, AT&T, Cavium, Ericsson, F5, Intel, Mellanox, NXP, Red Hat, ZTE; Silver members 6Wind, Broadcom, Huawei, Spirent; and Associate members Eötvös Loránd University, KAIST, Tsinghua University, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and University of Limerick.  

DPDK will host its next DPDK Summit in Beijing, China on June 28. Co-located with LinuxCon + ContainerCon +  Cloud Open China 2018, the agenda will cover the latest developments to DPDK and other related projects, plans for future releases, and updates from DPDK end users. More details, including registration information, are available here: http://linux.31huiyi.com/   

For more information or details on how to participate in the DPDK Project, please visit: www.dpdk.org.

Supporting Quotes

“AT&T is proud of the advancements the DPDK community has accomplished since joining The Linux Foundation a year ago,” said Mazin Gilbert, VP of Advanced Technology at AT&T Labs. “This release further accelerates packet processing workloads, which is critical as we move to the 5G era where we’ll see an explosion of devices and machines requiring high-bandwidth and low-latency connections for applications such as video processing, data analytics, augmented reality and virtual reality, and more.”

“F5 is pleased to see yet another strong delivery by the DPDK.org community. The 18.05 Venky release contains vital enhancements for hardware acceleration which broadens the value proposition for end customers, making this open community even more attractive and valuable to all ecosystem players,”  said Dave Schmitt, Chief Architect, F5 Networks.

About DPDK
The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) project consists of libraries and drivers to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. By enabling very fast packet processing, DPDK makes it possible for organizations to move performance-sensitive applications to the cloud. Created in 2010 by Intel and made available under a permissive open source license, the open source community was established at DPDK.org in 2013 by 6WIND and moved under the auspices of The Linux Foundation in 2017.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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