Project focused on libraries of packet processing acceleration will join other open networking projects under the Linux organization.

April 3, 2017

2 Min Read

SANTA CLARA, Calif., -- Open Networking Summit -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced that the DPDK Project (Data Plane Development Kit) community has moved to The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral home that promotes collaboration around open source technologies, such as a technical governance model that enables the growth of developer communities.

The DPDK Project includes members from the telecommunications industry, network and cloud infrastructure vendors, as well as multiple hardware vendors. Gold members of the project are ARM, AT&T, Cavium, Intel, Mellanox, NXP, Red Hat, and ZTE Corporation. Silver members of DPDK include 6WIND, Atomic Rules, Huawei, Spirent, and Wind River. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), University of Limerick, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Tsinghua University are Associate members.

“An open governance structure will encourage continued growth and investment in the DPDK developer community,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. “We believe the vibrant DPDK developer community will quickly grow in their new home and fuel continued rapid innovation in open networking.”

DPDK is the Data Plane Development Kit that consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. In a world where the network is becoming fundamental to the way people communicate, performance, throughput, and latency are increasingly important for applications like wireless core and access, wireline infrastructure, routers, load balancers, firewalls, video streaming, VoIP, and more. By enabling very fast packet processing, DPDK is making it possible for the telecommunications industry to move performance-sensitive applications like the backbone for mobile networks and voice to the cloud. It was also identified as a key enabling technology for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in the original ETSI NFV White Paper.

DPDK was 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 has facilitated the continued expansion of the project. Since then, the community has been continuously growing in terms of the number of contributors, patches, and contributing organizations, with 10 major releases completed including contributions from over 400 individuals from 70 different organizations. DPDK now supports all major CPU architectures and NICs from multiple vendors, which makes it ideally suited to applications that need to be portable across multiple platforms.

More than 20 key open source projects build on DPDK libraries, including MoonGen, mTCP, Ostinato, Lagopus, Fast Data (FD.io), Open vSwitch, OPNFV, and OpenStack. Strengthening the ecosystem around DPDK will enable it to meet the needs of the users and projects that depend on it and helps to foster open innovation.

Linux Foundation

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