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DPDK Welcomes Microsoft

By Blog

To learn more about Microsoft, DPDK’s newest Gold member, and how they are working within the DPDK community, we sat down with Omar Cardona, Doug Stamper and Harini Ramakrishnan from the Core Networking team for a Q&A session.  Read below to see how Microsoft collaborates with DPDK. 

Can you tell us a little about your organization/department?

We are the Core Networking team in the Azure Edge + Platform (Azure E+P) group at Microsoft. Our organization has the charter to deliver platform innovation to support Microsoft Core OSes and bring services to modernize customer infrastructure. Our team is responsible for the L1-L7 networking stack including offloads, driver platform, transports, and HTTP across the cloud and edge. We are also responsible for SDN and container/Kubernetes networking. Key to our mission is a predictable, high bandwidth, low latency networking data plane that serves as the foundation for cloud and edge infrastructure and services. 

Why is your organization adopting an open source approach? 

Microsoft strongly believes in working with the open source communities on technological innovations to deliver transformational experiences. Multiple teams in our organization are contributing to and working with open source communities and standard bodies to innovate in the open, accelerating adoption and standardization. In fact, we have a sister team contributing to the Linux Kernel, and general Linux OS and tooling.  They work across Microsoft Cloud and On-Prem deployments, having a long-standing partnership with the DPDK community.

We have heard from our ecosystem partners and customers a desire in aligning Windows with Linux and Open Source on networking architecture and implementation. Towards this end, it was a natural progression for us to collaborate with the DPDK community and align our data plane investments. 

Why did you join DPDK and what sort of impact do you think DPDK has on the data plane?

Workloads today require an insatiable amount of network bandwidth with low latency performance. NICs are getting faster with 200GbE in the horizon, while single threaded performance of a CPU seems to be stagnating. Customers do not want to compromise their experience and are seamlessly moving workloads between the cloud and the edge deployments. The high packet rates of a cloud and a container world pose a significant challenge to the OS Kernel network stack, specifically for Virtual Networking and Network Function Virtualization. While the Windows network stack has evolved tremendously improving the cycles/per byte performance over the years, we are nearing the point of diminishing returns.  

DPDK successfully by-passes the limitations of the in-kernel network stack, while also providing a path to user mode processing. The ecosystem and ISVs are observing that DPDK allows them to enter a different realm of network performance, even at the cost of dedicating the hardware to the appliance.

We saw this with the MVP Windows DPDK port, back in 2017, when optimized l2fwd and l3fwd sample applications reached up to 70Mpps performance on Windows, Making networking apps scream on Windows with DPDK – YouTube. This is not possible today with native socket implementation on Windows. 

We believe that through our partnership with the DPDK community, we can bring this to more Windows users. 

  What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the DPDK community?

Significant effort has been underway over the last couple of years, to add Windows platform support to DPDK. Today, with v20.11 release, we have ~10 critical core libraries and drivers working on Windows platform. This would not have been possible without the support of our partners at Intel and Mellanox, under the guidance of the Techboard lead Thomas Monjalon. Not to forget critical contributions from DPDK end users and maintainers on memory management and stabilization. We would have likely not gotten the reach that we have today, but for the community. 

There is a long journey ahead to integrate Windows Platform support to ensure that each new version of DPDK libraries and APIs will build and run successfully on Windows (without forking) as validated by testing performed by the community lab. Monumental efforts are required to bring these solutions to work seamlessly with the Windows ecosystem. We hope that by working with the DPDK community, we can learn from the collective expertise and leverage the performance standardization that DPDK brings. We are deeply interested in enabling a kernel-bypass technology on Windows for devices and appliances ranging from IOT, to Client, to Cloud Based Servers. 

Aligning with the community on a high-performance packet processing model allows us to contribute and leverage mindshare, and co-engineer towards a common goal. 

What sort of contributions has your team made –or plans to make — to the community,ecosystem through DPDK participation?

One of the primary contributions from Microsoft has been bringing the ecosystem together to collectively consider DPDK as a viable kernel bypass technology on Windows. In addition, we have begun our contributions with the generic NetUIO driver for Windows. We have contributions in the pipeline which will bring support for applications such as testpmd and tools. This is just the beginning; we are looking forward to working with the UNH lab in standardizing testing on Windows SKUs and bringing our ability to get the most out of Windows to the community. We are experimenting with Network Virtualization for VM and Container performance, and increasingly leveraging DPDK tooling for Network performance profiling.

What do you think sets DPDK apart from other industry alliances or organizations?

DPDK brings unparalleled and extreme focus on network performance.  DPDK is very well organized, with good code structure and great documentation to simplify onboarding.  It has a sensible multi-platform strategy, feasible for Windows inclusion.  Specifically, the modularity and cohesion of the components and ease of combining the minimal necessary libraries to achieve application performance goals.

How will DPDK help your business?

Our team contributes to the multi-OS platform, foundational to operate and scale Microsoft’s businesses across Azure Cloud and Edge portfolio of products. Increasing application density and bandwidth requirements on our data plane, across Windows and Linux, necessitates an investment in a promising network stack bypass technology such as DPDK. DPDK’s user space poll-based, run-to-completion model allows for significant scaling of network performance in the face of stalled CPU speeds.

Working with the community on how DPDK lands on Windows Platform allows modernization of the network data path for future workloads.  Additionally, a common architecture increases the overall quality of the drivers and consumers, benefiting all DPDK high volume platforms.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining DPDK or getting involved in open source?

The first step would be to subscribe to the dev@dpdk.org email list and observe how the community functions. It’s good to start small and identify an area of expertise to contribute to. Something as simple as reviewing and testing incoming patches adds value. Beyond that, participating by submitting patches, contributing to tool chains, adding CI tests are all valuable ways to contribute. 

We are looking for contributions and expertise to bring DPDK Windows forward. Contribute patches under the guidelines, reference “dpdk-windows” in the email or write to dpdkwin@microsoft.com. We have a Windows working group that you can also join to learn how to help. 

What do you want to tell those members of the community that are interested in Windows Platform support?

Test the DPDK libraries on Windows and share your feedback! Head over to the getting started guide. A general roadmap has been published, however, we want to hear from the community to further influence our roadmap. Encourage everyone to participate in the survey below:

DPDK Governing Board Update – November 2020

By Blog

The DPDK Project has had an active third quarter thus far with the DPDK Userspace Summit in September, release of 20.11 release (the biggest DPDK release yet!), and the Governing Board focused on 2021 planning and budgeting during an October 13 virtual meeting. 

A release candidate (RC3)  for 20.11 went out last week, and turned out to be one of the biggest releases to date for DPDK. Notable updates include:  

We continue to seek additional DPDK reviewers and are looking for volunteers. If you are an active contributor to DPDK, we invite you to help review your fellow contributors’ patches; help us collectively improve DPDK releases

DPDK Userspace Summit

Capping off a tumultuous 2020, the DPDK community came together virtually for the  DPDK Userspace Summit, September 22-23rd. With over 550 registrants and 250 active participants from over 46 countries, the ecosystem came together for what was one of the largest DPDK Userspace Summits to date. We would like to extend a thank you to all the speakers, planning committee members, as well as and Arm for sponsoring the event.  Technical Presentations and videos are available in the event archive: https://www.dpdk.org/event/dpdk-userspace-summit/ 

Happy 10 years, DPDK!

DPDK project celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary during the virtual summit, marking the occasion with a new celebratory webpage, with excerpts and pictures from across the community: https://www.dpdk.org/10th-anniversary/ 

Please join us in also recognizing this year’s recipients of the 2020 Community Awards. https://www.dpdk.org/blog/2020/09/27/dpdk-community-awards-recognize-development-excellence/ 

By the Numbers

Looking back at the year, we have a lot to be proud of as a community: 

  • 2,086 Commits, 199 Authors, 18 Repositories
  • Releases: 
  • Membership Revenue saw a 14% increase over 2019
  • Events: DPDK virtual userspace 570 registered, 250 active participants
  • Community Lab testing coverage has expanded, and exceeded the original target set by the Testing Working Group. 
  • DPDK website pageviews: 36,500 (over past 90 days)
  • Publication of the DPDK White paper and video series
  • Twitter followers over 1060+

Other Notable Updates

Upcoming Events: With the prevailing impact of the global pandemic, DPDK continues to monitor and assess the viability of hosting an in person gathering; as of today, we have moved to a virtual event calendar and anticipate our next virtual gathering towards the end of Q1, 2021. Look forward to an event and CFP announcement soon. 

Budget: The Board has updated the budget to reflect our real-time changes as a result of the impact of COVID-19 and is currently discussing 2021 budget priorities and alignment. We will provide an update once the preliminary budget has been made. 

Lab: A sub-team has been working with the DPDK Community Lab team, including UNH-IOL, to expand the testing coverage provided by the Community Lab. We are happy to report that under the guidance of the Technical Steering Committee, the Testing Group has exceeded their targeted testing coverage goals of 40%, with over 56% Functional test coverage in the community lab.  The Community Lab team continues to refine its practices and plans to expand in the coming months. 

Member Outreach: No changes to membership this quarter.  If you have any suggestions for companies or individuals that we should reach out to, please let us know.

 Thank you for your continued engagement with the DPDK community! We hope everyone is staying healthy and keeping busy during these uncertain times.

DPDK Issues 20.11, Most Robust DPDK Release Ever!

By Announcements, Blog

A new major DPDK release is now available: https://fast.dpdk.org/rel/dpdk-20.11.tar.xz

Our Thanksgiving gift to the ecosystem is the biggest DPDK release ever, with:

  •     2195 commits from 214 authors
  •     2665 files changed, 269546 insertions(+), 107426 deletions(-)

The branch 20.11 should be supported for at least two years, making it recommended for system integration and deployment. The maintainer of this new LTS is Kevin Traynor.

The new major ABI version is 21. The next releases 21.02, 21.05 and 21.08 will be ABI compatible with 20.11.

Below are some new features, grouped by category.

  • General
    • mbuf dynamic area increased from 16 to 36 bytes
    • ring zero cop
    • SIMD bitwidth limit API
    • Windows PCI netuio
    • moved igb_uio to dpdk-kmods/linux
    • removed Python 2 support
    • removed Make support
  • Networking
    •  FEC AP
    • Rx buffer split
    • thread safety in flow API
    • shared action in flow API
    •  flow sampling and mirroring
    • tunnel offload API
    •  multi-port hairpin
    • Solarflare EF100 architecture
    • Wangxun txgbe driver
    • vhost-vDPA backend in virtio-user
    • removed vhost dequeue zero-copy
    •  removed legacy ethdev filtering
    • SWX pipeline aligned with P4
  • Baseband
    • Intel ACC100 driver
  • Cryptography
    • raw datapath API
    • Broadcom BCMFS symmetric crypto driver
  • RegEx
    • Marvell OCTEON TX2 regex driver
  • Others
    • Intel DLB/DLB2 drivers
    • Intel DSA support in IOAT driver

More details in the release notes:https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/rel_notes/release_20_11.html

There are 64 new contributors (including authors, reviewers and testers). Welcome to Aidan Goddard, Amit Bernstein, Andrey Vesnovaty, Artur Rojek, Benoît Ganne, Brandon Lo, Brian Johnson, Brian Poole, Christophe Grosse, Churchill Khangar, Conor Walsh, David Liu, Dawid Lukwinski, Diogo Behrens, Dongdong Liu, Franck Lenormand, Galazka Krzysztof, Guoyang Zhou, Haggai Eran, Harshitha Ramamurthy, Ibtisam Tariq, Ido Segev, Jay Jayatheerthan, Jiawen Wu, Jie Zhou, John Alexander, Julien Massonneau, Jørgen Østergaard Sloth, Khoa To, Li Zhang, Lingli Chen, Liu Tianjiao, Maciej Rabeda, Marcel Cornu, Mike Ximing Chen, Muthurajan Jayakumar, Nan Chen, Nick Connolly, Norbert Ciosek, Omkar Maslekar, Padraig Connolly, Piotr Bronowski, Przemyslaw Ciesielski, Qin Sun, Radha Mohan Chintakuntla, Rani Sharoni, Raveendra Padasalagi, Robin Zhang, RongQing Li, Shay Amir, Steve Yang, Steven Lariau, Tom Rix, Venkata Suresh Kumar P, Vijay Kumar Srivastava, Vikas Gupta, Vimal Chungath, Vipul Ashri, Wei Huang, Wei Ling, Weqaar Janjua, Yi Yang, Yogesh Jangra and Zhenghua Zhou.

Below is the breakout of commits by employer:

     Based on Reviewed-by and Acked-by tags, the top non-PMD reviewers are:

        128     Ferruh Yigit <ferruh.yigit@intel.com>
         68     Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>
         63     Andrew Rybchenko <andrew.rybchenko@oktetlabs.ru>
         62     David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>
         53     Ruifeng Wang <ruifeng.wang@arm.com>
         40     Konstantin Ananyev <konstantin.ananyev@intel.com>
         38     Ajit Khaparde <ajit.khaparde@broadcom.com>
         37     Ori Kam <orika@nvidia.com>
         33     Honnappa Nagarahalli <honnappa.nagarahalli@arm.com>

New features for 21.02 may be submitted during the next 3 weeks, in order to be reviewed and integrated before mid-January. DPDK 21.02 should be small in order to release in early February:  https://core.dpdk.org/roadmap#dates

Please share your roadmap.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this release happen – what a great way to wrap up 2020!

DPDK Community Awards Recognize Development Excellence

By Blog

For the past three years, the DPDK developer community has honored some of the most outstanding contributions across the project over the past year. While things are quite different this year, we still wanted to take some time to call out some of the amazing success of our developers. While normally, the community meets together in person for the DPDK Userspace Summit (previous locations include Bordeaux, France and Dublin, Ireland) to share knowledge, collaborate on best practices and community alignment, this year’s event was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Not to break tradition, 2020 winners were still recognized during the event on September 22’s Opening Remarks by  DPDK Board Chair Jim St. Leger. We were pleased to welcome even more attendees to this year’s event, given folks were able to join from their own homes. 

Please join us in congratulating all of our nominees and winners!

Innovation Award: 
Jerin Jacobs, Marvell (traces)
Viacheslav Ovsiienko, Mellanox/NVIDIA (external mbufs)

Contribution: Code
Dmitry Kozlyuk  (Windows port)

Contribution: Reviewing
Andrew Rybchenko of Solarflare 
Morten Brørup, Smart Share Systems 

Contribution: Maintainer
Akhil Goyal, NXP  (next-crypto tree)

Contribution: Testing
David Marchand, Red Hat (ABI compatibility)

DPDK Operations Award
Luca Boccassi, Debian
Kevin Traynor, Red Hat
(stable branches maintainers)

Creating a CI Testbed for DPDK

By Blog

By Lincoln Lavoie, UNH-IOL, Principal Engineer

A little more than 3 years ago, we set out to improve the qualities and capabilities of the continuous integration (CI) testing of the DPDK source code and new patches.  Now, it’s not uncommon for testing to come last in the process, and sometimes it doesn’t receive it’s fair share of attention.  Which of us hasn’t worked on a project, with the boss pushing off the testing efforts or milestones, in order to allow “just that bit more” focus or expansion on the features or customer wishes for the project?  However, as DPDK has matured and is a key foundation for many applications and deployments, we need to ensure the stability and robustness of the codebase and incoming patches.

Enter the Community CI team, a virtual team of DPDK community members who meet regularly and help maintain all of the tooling that enables the testing activities.  We’re working to better organize and support the testing resources available to the DPDK development teams.  Today, there are 3 primary testing sources, running as TravisCI, Intel’s hosted lab, and the community lab hosted at the UNH-IOL. Each of the “labs” provides results back to the DPDK project’s patchwork tracking system, and tests different aspects of the “code,” ranging from compile and unit tests, to performance and functionality tests on bare-metal with real NICs and drivers. 

We thought it might be worthwhile to spend a few words on a blog to highlight what testing is already running, what testing is under development, and finally, where do we see things going from here.  Starting with the Travis CI systems, which are triggered from a github robot that is tracking commits on the main branch, running compile and unit testing across both x86 and aarch64 architectures, with cross compiles to 32-bit, all on top of the Ubuntu OS.  The robot and CI jobs for this integration have been developed and maintained largely by our Redhat peers, so, shoutouts where they’re due, “great job guys!”  You can check out the Travis CI builds here: https://travis-ci.com/github/DPDK

Next up, Intel’s hosted lab, where they are running compile testing across a number of different operating systems on x86 hardware.  The operating systems range from Linux distros, to FreeBSD, and even Windows.  Adding another dimension, the compilation is also checked using both Makefile and Meson.  The system is tracking both the main branch and as well as providing results for patches, before their merge onto the main, and provides early feedback to the patch submitter if issues pop up from a patch, afterall, “who knew” that approach didn’t work over all of DPDK’s supported OSes (well, now you know).  Intel’s support in providing both the hosted lab environment and keeping things running smoothly is a great help, “thanks Intel team!”  You can see a sample of the Intel hosted lab output in patchworks here: https://patchwork.dpdk.org/patch/75413/

Lastly, for the currently operating testing, is the community lab, hosted at the UNH-IOL.  Testing in the community lab is also tracking both the main branch and submitted patches, providing a combination of compile, unit testing, functional testing, and performance testing.  The compile and unit testing also add one additional dimension, with some cooperation to downstream projects, such as Open vSwitch and SPDK, providing early detection of a patch breaking outside of DPDK directly.  For the functional and performance testing, the lab hosts a number of “bare-metal” systems with NICs provided by DPDK member companies, including Broadcom, Intel, Mellanox, and NXP currently.  The performance testing runs a throughput test on each NIC (in some cases there are multiple speeds or hardware variants included), checking for a drop in forwarding performance from a well known reference.  Gold and Silver DPDK member companies are eligible to submit hardware for hosting in the community lab and are strongly encouraged to do so by the governing and tech boards of DPDK, as this directly expands the testing coverages.  Functional testing is the newest and growing aspect within the community lab output, adding more tests running on “bare-metal”, based on the DTS (DPDK Test Suite) project.  Aiming to provide majority coverage for the NIC features list.  The community lab results also feed directly into the patchwork system, with additional information available on the lab portal as well: https://lab.dpdk.org/results/dashboard/

Looking to the future, there are two efforts currently underway.  First, the robot that is tracking the github main branch is being extended to also drive builds on the OpenSUSE Build Service (OBS), further extending that coverage to more OS / build variants.  Second is the expansion of the feature testing coverage, which is focused on extending and updating the DTS coverage, with that work driving back into the functional testing run in the community lab.  

The Community CI team meets every other week, on Thursdays, at 1pm UTC.  All DPDK community members and maintainers are welcome to join and participate in the discussions, just drop a line to ci@dpdk.org.  We hope to see you there!

DPDK’s 20.08 Release is Here!

By Blog

A new release is available:
        https://fast.dpdk.org/rel/dpdk-20.08.tar.xz

This version could be named Twins: 20.08 is released on 2020-08-08.
The other numbers are:

  • 1175 commits from 159 authors
  • 1199 files changed, 137604 insertions(+), 35611 deletions(-)

It is not planned to start a maintenance branch for 20.08. This version as previous ones are ABI-compatible with 19.11.

Below are some new features, grouped by category.

  • General
    • external thread registration API
    • bit operations API for drivers
    • VFIO PF with VF token
    • new mempool ring modes (RTS/HTS)
  • Networking
    • eCPRI offload with flow API
    • Tx scheduling offload
  • Cryptography
    • crypto-CRC chained operation for DOCSIS protocol
  • RegEx
    • new device class API for future RegEx drivers
    • Nvidia Mellanox RegEx driver for BlueField-2 DPU
  • Tools
    • testpmd 5-tuple swap for L2/L3/L4
    • performance test application for flow rules
    • l2fwd forwarding between asymmetric ports

More details in the release notes:
        http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/rel_notes/release_20_08.html

There are 52 new contributors (including authors, reviewers and testers).
Welcome to Adrián Moreno, Archit Pandey, Bin Huang, Devendra Singh Rawat, Dodji Seketeli, Dongyang Pan, Evgeny Efimov, Francis Kelly, Gaurav Singh, Gregory Etelson, Guy Kaneti, Hongzhi Guo, Hrvoje Habjanic,
Jakub Chylkowski, Jecky Pei, Jeff Kirsher,  Kamil Bednarczyk,
Levend Sayar, Long Li, Lotem Leder, Maciej Hefczyc, Mao Jiang,
Mateusz Kowalski, Netanel Gonen, Nick Nunley, Nir Efrati, Parav Pandit,
Patrick Fu, Pavel Ivashchenko, Piotr Skajewski, Renata Saiakhova,
Roman Fridlyand, Roman Kapl, Sasha Neftin, Sergey Madaminov,
Shibin Koikkara Reeny, Shuanglin Wang, Shy Shyman, Simon Horman,
Stanislaw Grzeszczak, Surabhi Boob, Thierry Martin, Timothy McDaniel,
Todd Fujinaka, Vitaly Lifshits, Vivien Didelot, Wei Xie, Weifeng Li,
Yicai Lu, Yuval Avnery, Yuying Zhang, and Zhiguang He.

Below is the number of commits per employer (with authors count):
        362     Intel (45)
        276     Nvidia Mellanox (24)
        157     Broadcom (15)
         68     Huawei (10)
         64     Red Hat (5)
         51     NXP (8)
         50     ARM (5)
         49     Marvell (12)
         32     Microsoft (3)
         16     BIFIT (1)
          7     Emumba (2)
          6     Solarflare (1)
          6     Chelsio (2)
          5     OKTET Labs (4)

The new features for 20.11 can be submitted during one month.
DPDK 20.11 will be a big and busy release. Please check the schedule:
        http://core.dpdk.org/roadmap#dates

Thanks everyone, stay safe and keep up morale.

DPDK Governing board Update – July 2020

By Blog

The DPDK Project Governing board held a “virtual” meeting on July 13th, welcoming both Doug Stamper from Microsoft and Marvell’s new representative, Prasun Kapoor, to the board. Bruce Richardson (of Intel) rotated into the Technical Board representative seat, previously held by Thomas Monjalon (of Mellanox/NVIDIA), in Q3. Note, the Technical Board seat is rotated among Technical Board members on a quarterly basis.

It was noted that 20.08 RC2 went out this week, and it’s shaping up to be a big release! The DPDK project is looking for more code reviewers. If you are an active contributor to DPDK, we invite you to help review your fellow contributors’ patches; help us collectively improve DPDK releases (team work makes the dream work). We would like to thank the entire DPDK developer community who does the hard work that makes our project what it is.

The board recognized the ongoing efforts by Stephen Hemminger (Microsoft) and project maintainers to adopt more inclusive code language, with the replacement of terms like “Blacklist-Whitelist” and “Master-Slave.” Inclusive language aims to avoid expressions and terms that could be perceived as racist, sexist, ableist, or generally biased, prejudiced or demeaning to any particular group of people. DPDK joins other open source groups, including the Linux Kernel community, in working towards improving the use of inclusive language blocks. We know these changes require significant work. We are appreciative to the commitment of our entire community to support the transition to more inclusive terminology in the upcoming 20.11 release.

Additional updates from the Governing Board:

Updated DPDK Charter: Following up on our earlier summer update, the Governing Board, in conjunction with the Technical Board, concluded its months-long review and revision of the DPDK Charter, presenting it for ratification to the Governing Board at the meeting this week. The Governing Board unanimously approved the charter revisions in their entirety.

The edits bring the Charter up-to-date and serve as a current reflection of the project as it is today. The latest charter is available at https://www.dpdk.org/charter/, with changes noted in the table. Please take a look.

Events: We are moving solely to virtual events this year. The DPDK Summit Userspace event will take place virtually September 22-23. Registration is now live, and we encourage you to register early. Be on the lookout for agenda updates.

Budget: The Board has updated the budget to reflect our real-time changes as a result of the impact of COVID-19.

Lab: A sub-team has been working with the DPDK Community Lab team, including UNH-IOL. We are making good progress to properly resource, fund, and improve our lab’s community benefit.

Member Outreach: As mentioned earlier this summer, the board has also started a sub-committee that is looking to grow the DPDK Project’s membership. If you have any suggestions for companies or individuals that we should reach out to, please let us know.

Thank you for your continued engagement with the DPDK community! We hope everyone is staying healthy and keeping busy during these uncertain times

DPDK Community Update – Summer 2020

By Blog

We hope you are keeping safe and healthy, as we all adjust to the new normal we find ourselves in, with coronavirus and social unrest around us.  We’re proud of the leadership of our technical community to tackle our own issues and moving to more inclusive language, removing divisive terminology (e.g master/slave) that does not reflect our community values. Thank you for your leadership and work. It is greatly appreciated.

The DPDK project Governing Board, Technical Board, Marketing and other working groups have been busy over the past couple months. 

The Governing Board has held two meetings since the lock-downs went into effect, in April and early June, reassessing the project budget, marketing and event plans, while the Technical Board continued to focus on the technical priorities of DPDK, with the recent release of 20.05. Our community continues their stellar reputation of delivering our releases on time. Well done!

As we will not be able to meet in person for some time, and unable to provide the usual Governing Board readout on stage at one of the DPDK Summits, we wanted to provide a short written update, that we will continue on a regular basis moving forward. And we do apologize for not providing more timely governing board activity updates in the past. We will strive to improve and keep the communication open and timely. Do not hesitate to reach out should you have any questions. 

DPDK Welcomes New Members

Our community thrives through the work of the community and the financial support enabled by our members. We are pleased to share recent additions to the DPDK Project membership. The DPDK Project welcomes Microsoft as our newest Gold member, with Mr. Douglas Stamper joining the Governing Board, bringing his expertise with DPDK and the Windows ecosystem. Additionally, AMD joined as a Silver member. Welcome to both companies!

         

 

DPDK Userspace Summit 2020 Moves to a Virtual Format

Due to the prevailing coronavirus situation across the globe and related travel restrictions, we made the difficult decision to transition the DPDK Userspace Summit to a virtual experience, happening September 22-23. The Call for proposals and registration are now open. Note that the CFP closes July 12. Please consider submitting an abstract! We hope you will join us! 

DPDK will continue to monitor the prevailing situation and assess the feasibility of safely holding physical community gatherings. Please bear with us. 

  • China and Japan events are on hold. It is currently looking unlikely we can make in-person events happen in 2020. 
  • The US DPDK Summit event is pushed out to Q1 of 2021.

Strategic and Financial Update

It is of note that the DPDK project is in a financially sound position to see 2020 through, under the watchful gaze of the Governing Board’s Financial committee, chaired by Rashid Khan from Red Hat. 

The Governing Board reviewed and approved an updated 2020 budget including our anticipated 2020 expenses of $316k, deferring unused event allocations to our reserve fund, in anticipation of 2021 events and the Community Lab expansion. 

The Governing Board has noted the importance of member retention and recruitment, particularly in these uncertain times, with the formation of a Strategic Outreach working group, comprised of a sub-group of Governing Board members, tasked with ensuring the identity, focus, and charter of DPDK is clearly captured, published and communicated, along with a clear and compelling membership value proposition. 

Towards this end, the Governing Board in conjunction with the Technical Board, has spent the last month reviewing and updating the DPDK Charter, which has not seen any significant changes over the past 3 years. The edits will bring the Charter up to date and serve as a current reflection of the project as it is today.    

The DPDK Project has also launched a new project analytics dashboard, providing insights into development activity and contributions. We continue to be an active healthy community. Please try out the new tool. Let us know if you feel the data is accurate and reflects the community breadth of contributors.

Community Lab Expansion 

As Jim and Thomas shared in an earlier message to the community, we have been evaluating the value and role of the DPDK Community Lab, hosted at University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab, (UNH IoL).  Upon the recommendations of the Technical Board, the lab continues to play a key role in regression testing. The Governing Board has approved up to $35,000 in additional investment to expand the test coverage and support provided to the community through the Community Lab. We anticipate increasing the depth and breadth of test cases available to the community.  

The Community Lab meets on a bi-weekly basis and is open to the DPDK community. We would encourage you to participate –  reach out to ci@dpdk.org to be added to the meeting calendar invite.

DPDK Marketing Activities

The marketing working group has a new project whitepaper and companion video series, to be published in the coming month.  Keep an eye out for it!

In 2020, DPDK celebrates 10 years as an active open source project from its formative years at Intel. We have come a long way since then, becoming the world’s leading open source packet processing tool kit.  Stay tuned for a fun look back across the past 10 years. 

Expect to see some exciting things happening over the next couple months. Stay tuned for more! And please let us know if you would like more information on any of these topics. 

 

DPDK’s 20.05 Release is Here!

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A new DPDK release, 20.05,  is available here: https://fast.dpdk.org/rel/dpdk-20.05.tar.xz

It was quite a big release cycle, with:

  •         1304 commits from 189 authors
  •         1983 files changed, 145825 insertions(+), 29147 deletions(-)

There are no plans (yet) to start a maintenance branch for 20.05.

This version, as the previous one (20.02), is ABI-compatible with 19.11.

Below are some new features, grouped by category.

  • General
    • packet processing graph
    • ring synchronisation modes for VMs and containers
    • RCU API for deferred resource reclamation
    • telemetry rework
    • low overhead tracing framework
    • GCC 10 support
  • Networking
    •  flowaging API
    • driver for Intel Foxville I225
  • Cryptography
    • ChaCha20-Poly1305 crypto algorithm
    • event mode in the example application ipsec-secgw
  •  Baseband
    • 5G driver for Intel FPGA-based N3000

More details in the release notes: http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/rel_notes/release_20_05.html

There are 69 new contributors (including authors, reviewers and testers):

Welcome to Andrea Arcangeli, Asim Jamshed, Cheng Peng, Christos Ricudis, Dave Burley, Dong Zhou, Dongsheng Rong, Eugeny Parshutin, Evan Swanson, Fady Bader, Farah Smith, Guy Tzalik, Hailin Xu, Igor Russkikh, JP Lee, Jakub Neruda, James Fox, Jianwei Mei, Jiawei Wang, Jun W Zhou, Juraj Linkeš, Karra Satwik, Kishore Padmanabha, Lihong Ma, Lijian Zhang, Linsi Yuan, Louise Kilheeney, Lukasz Wojciechowski, Mairtin o Loingsigh, Martin Spinler, Matteo Croce, Michael Haeuptle, Mike Baucom, Mit Matelske, Mohsin Shaikh, Muhammad Ahmad, Muhammad Bilal, Nannan Lu, Narcisa Vasile, Niall Power, Peter Spreadborough, Przemyslaw Patynowski, Qi Fu, Real Valiquette, Rohit Raj, Roland Qi, Sarosh Arif, Satheesh Paul, Shahaji Bhosle, Sharon Haroni, Sivaprasad Tummala, Souvik Dey, Steven Webster, Tal Shnaiderman, Tasnim Bashar, Vadim Podovinnikov, Venky Venkatesh, Vijaya Mohan Guvva, Vu Pham, Wentao Cui, Xi Zhang, Xiaoxiao Zeng, Xinfeng Zhao, Yash Sharma, Yu Jiang, Zalfresso-Jundzillo, Zhihong Peng, Zhimin Huang, and Zhiwei He.

Here is a breakout of patches per company contribution:

The new features for 20.08 may be submitted during the next 17 days.  DPDK 20.08 should be released in early August, in a tight schedule:  http://core.dpdk.org/roadmap#dates

Thanks to the entire DPDK community, and happy birthday to our RTE_MAGIC!

Community Update from the DPDK Board & Tech Chairs

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Greetings DPDK Project Community:

 We hope you are managing okay and remaining safe and healthy as the coronavirus crisis has thrown the world into a frenzy.  While many of us are used to working remotely and using online collaborative tools, we are having to adapt to new circumstances at home. It’s hard on everyone.  

 The DPDK Governing Board, Technical Board, and Marketing Committee have been hard at work locking down our final 2020 budget, crafting plans around worldwide DPDK Summit events, and exploring hosting a broader data plane projects developer event.  However, upcoming public gatherings and events have been cancelled or postponed and are no longer an option in the near term. DPDK has not yet migrated to virtual events. For now, our plans around DPDK Summit events are in flux:

  •  China and Japan events are on hold. As things develop further we will see if we can make something happen, perhaps in Q3 or Q4. 
  • The US DPDK Summit event is  pushed out to Q1 of 2021. The team made this decision before the pandemic emerged in order to create some  calendar space between the Summit and Userspace events. We have targeted the second half of September for the Userspace event, continuing to host it in Bordeaux.  As of now this is still our intent. But as we’re sure you can understand, the situation remains fluid until the pandemic subsides. Please bear with us.

 We have also continued to explore options to increase the value and role of the DPDK Community Lab that is currently hosted at the University of New Hampshire, InterOperability Lab, also known as UNH/IoL. We’d like to acknowledge Lincoln Lavoie and team’s continued efforts here, especially as he remains in the lab to triage hardware issues. However, we’ve struggled to find community volunteers to step up and lead the lab effort.  We are now looking at alternatives including a minimum set of activities and regression tests that the Technical Board recommends we maintain. Other efforts to expand the use of the lab will likely require additional budget. We are trying to converge on a solution. Help is still welcome should anyone want to get more involved.

The community continues to be amazing.  This year we’ve delivered our 20.02 release with few time accommodations.  Work is underway for the 20.05 release with several new features and improvements. https://core.dpdk.org/roadmap/ 20.08 and 20.11 will follow.  We are confident the community collaboration and execution capability will serve us well during these times.  We are not expecting too much delay in releases. Of note, while most git maintainers do have a back-up in place, please let us know if you are able to help fill in any gaps. 

Overall we want to ensure you prioritize yourself and your family; your personal health and safety are paramount to us. Rest assured the DPDK community is here for you – whether it be  help on a features, code, or guidance on how to handle a challenging home dilemma, please do reach out. The DPDK family is strong and tremendously supportive. We are glad to be part of it.

Stay safe and healthy.

All the best,

Thomas and Jim