SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The P4 Language Consortium (P4.org), creator of the P4 programming language, today announced that it will become a project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and become part of the Linux Foundation (LF) portfolio for the purposes of strategic alignment across the open source ecosystem. Since its creation in 2013, P4 has been gaining adoption at an exponential rate, rapidly becoming the standard way to describe how packets are forwarded by networking devices including NICs, switches and routers. To better meet the needs of a growing and vibrant open-source developer community, P4.org is delighted to join forces with ONF and LF - the two largest open-source umbrella organizations in networking. "SDN has transformed the networking industry and P4 takes SDN to the next level by bringing programmability to the forwarding plane," said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director at Open Networking Foundation. "We are excited to have P4.org join ONF and are looking forward to seeing our synergy bring incredible benefits to the P4 and the larger SDN community."

"Linux Foundation is thrilled to welcome the P4 community," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at Linux Foundation. "Networking is a major focus at the foundation and the addition of the thriving P4 community combined with Linux Foundation Networking Projects in similar domains will drive innovation in networking to the next level."

The P4 language was originally created by a group of engineers and researchers from Google, Intel, Microsoft Research, Barefoot, Princeton and Stanford. The goal was simple: To create an easy-to-use language that a software developer can learn in a day, and use to precisely describe how packets are forwarded in a network. From the outset, P4 was designed to be target-independent (i.e. a program written in P4 could be compiled, without modification, to run on a variety of targets, such as ASICs, FPGAs, CPUs, NPUs, and GPUs), and protocol-independent (i.e. a P4 program can describe existing standard protocols, or be used to specify innovative, new, customized forwarding behaviors).

Open Networking Foundation