Fifteen Years In, Quietly Everywhere
August 2026 · 4 owned stories · Ecosystem reading list · APAC roundup
- Fifteen Years In, Quietly Everywhere
- Q2 at a Glance
- DPDK Summit Stockholm 2026: Session Highlights
- Q2 in Releases: 25.11 Ships in Ubuntu LTS
- Grout at Two Years: Router Reaches Debian
- Tim O’Driscoll: The View from the Governing Board
- NXP and the 20-Millisecond Requirement: Suchit Lepcha on i.MX 95
- A Day in the Life of a Packet: Part 3
- Ecosystem reading list
- APAC community roundup
The Stockholm summit in May put DPDK’s scope in one room: cryptographic offload into post-quantum, embedded RISC-V cores inside NICs, a wireless forwarding plane, Kubernetes-native routing, and deployment work under CERN’s prototype detectors and the DUNE neutrino observatory.
Awareness has kept up in 2026. A website refresh brought dpdk.org and core.dpdk.org under a single navigation, so developers who land on a blog or spotlight now move through to the roadmap, security process, and mailing lists without hunting. China continues to lead discovery, and the new WeChat channel built with Feng Chengwen at Huawei and Yong Wang at ZTE, with Bilibili launching soon, is making that audience visible inside the project rather than only in the analytics.
The contributor picture is more mixed. 55 new authors landed patches in H1 2026, nearly double the H2 2025 count, but the reviewer share of new entries fell from around 29 percent to around 8 percent. More people are showing up. Fewer are reviewing. DPDK is a sophisticated project to onboard, and reviewing takes no commit access. dpdk.org/review-your-first-patch is where H2 focuses new participation.
From the Governing Board, Tim O’Driscoll names four open questions for the next phase: DPDK’s place in AI infrastructure, its role in the Ultra Ethernet Consortium’s software stack, deeper crypto acceleration for network security, and reach into hyperscalers who already use it silently. He also names a tension the numbers cannot see. DPDK runs quietly in Formula 1 teams, radio telescopes, and high-frequency trading, and the users who depend on it most are the ones least visible in the mailing lists.
Fifteen years of API discipline means new hardware, new fabrics, and new workloads land against a stable interface. That is the direction: not a pivot, but the same layer taking on more.
Q2 at a Glance
Q2 tightened several long-running threads into the same shape. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS shipped with DPDK 25.11 as the default, closing a gap that used to run a release or two. Grout crossed from experiment into production, with FRR integration, an OpenShift deployment story, and a Debian packaging intent filed. NXP’s i.MX 95 landed on NVIDIA’s Holoscan Sensor Bridge partner list as the only microprocessor in the group, closing a 20-millisecond sensor budget where the kernel networking path could not. CERN’s DUNE programme is targeting 15 Tbit/s per detector supermodule across roughly 40 nodes. Bob McMahon’s summit talk put 802.11 itself on the table. AMD Pensando Salina, HPE’s second-generation smart switch, and CAICT naming the DPU as the third main chip alongside CPU and GPU all landed in the same twelve weeks.
DPDK Summit Stockholm 2026: Session Highlights
The two-day program at Scandic Continental covered rte_flow offload limits (Pavlina Patova), AI-assisted formal verification of the eBPF verifier (Mahsa Khalili, Claudia Cauli, Konstantin Ananyev), CI stress-testing with LLMs (Aaron Conole and Stephen Hemminger), embedded RISC-V cores on a NIC (Dmitry Kozlyuk), Multithreading on Eventdev (Mattias Rönnblom), and deployment stories from CERN’s prototype detectors, DUNE, ByteDance, and NXP. Thomas Monjalon closed. Session recordings drip weekly on the DPDK Project YouTube channel and syndicate through LinkedIn.
Q2 in Releases: 25.11 Ships in Ubuntu LTS
Five stable releases landed in Q2 across three LTS branches: 24.11.5 on 15 April, 25.11.1 on 21 April, 25.11.2 on 1 May, 23.11.7 on 5 May, and 24.11.6 on 19 May. 26.07-rc1 followed on 11 June, opening the next major cycle.
Downstream tracked closely. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” shipped on 23 April with dpdk 25.11-2 as the packaged default, the first Ubuntu LTS to carry the current 25.11 line. Debian uploaded 25.11.1-1 to unstable on 23 April and 25.11.2-1 on 7 May, migrating to testing within days each time. Both distributions skipped the 24.11 backport channel to move straight to 25.11.
Grout at Two Years: Router Reaches Debian
Grout, the DPDK-hosted graph router, had three sessions on the Summit programme: Grout: Two Years In (Robin Jarry), Integrating FRR with Grout (Jarry and Maxime Leroy), and Running a High-Performance DPDK-Based Router on Kubernetes (Andrea Panattoni). The two-year framing anchors the project’s move from prototype to something distributions can package.
Jarry filed the Debian Intent-to-Package for Grout 0.16.0 on 11 June. The declared feature set covers IPv4 and IPv6 forwarding, L2 bridging, IP-in-IP tunnels, stateless DNAT44 and stateful SNAT44 with conntrack, SRv6, DHCP client, and FRR integration through the zebra dplane plugin. Configuration runs over a UNIX socket API and the grcli shell.
Tim O’Driscoll: The View from the Governing Board
Tim O’Driscoll became DPDK’s Governing Board Chair after nearly two decades at Intel and a front-row seat on the project’s move to the Linux Foundation. He reflects on the invisible users, the contributor base’s tilt toward hardware vendors, and the technical questions that will define the next phase.
“It’s all about being on the inside setting the direction rather than on the outside looking in, having to follow a direction set by others.”
NXP and the 20-Millisecond Requirement: Suchit Lepcha on i.MX 95
An industrial robotics customer asked NXP to hit 20 milliseconds end-to-end for sensor streaming. Suchit Lepcha’s team met the number on the i.MX 95 microprocessor, which is now the only microprocessor in NVIDIA’s Holoscan Sensor Bridge ecosystem. The piece walks the path from the constraint back through the datapath to where DPDK carries the load.
Day in the Life Part 3
Part 3 of the series looks at what running a hosted Linux Foundation project actually involves week to week, from summit logistics through board coordination to the working groups that keep the project moving.
Ecosystem reading list
Third-party coverage and technical writing that intersects with DPDK’s work this quarter.
Enable Real-Time AI for High-Speed Data Acquisition with DAQIRI
NVIDIA Developer Blog covers A-GHOST at CERN, where FPGA-based hardware feeds a GPU farm over UDP and RoCE v2 at hundreds of Gbps. Direct thematic pair to the Q1 CHIME piece.
A Configurable Integration Framework for AGF and UPF on Heterogeneous Programmable Data Planes
Peer-reviewed 5G paper in MDPI Network, published 3 June. Combined AGF/UPF deployment shows lower end-to-end latency than separated. DPDK named in the keyword set.
HPE Strengthens Its Grip on the Smart Switch Market
Fierce Network on the CX-10040 platform, HPE’s second-generation distributed services switch, built with AMD Pensando. Adds 100G and 400G options to the range. Context for teams tracking the DPU and smart switch adjacencies to DPDK.
APAC community roundup
Institutional analysis and engineering deep-dives from the APAC region this quarter.
CAICT DPU Development Analysis Report (2026)
CAICT’s Cloud Computing and Digitalisation Institute released its 2026 Chinese DPU industry report in May, framing DPU as the third main chip of the computing infrastructure and placing DPDK in the pre-DPU software acceleration lineage. Highest-authority APAC document of the quarter.
DPDK rte_ring Compared with Go Channels, crossbeam-channel, and LMAX Disruptor
Chinese-language engineering write-up from the 土法炼钢 collective, published 8 May. Treats DPDK’s ring library as reference material against Go and Rust concurrency primitives and closes with a full C implementation of a bounded MPMC queue.
eBPF Network Subsystem Evolution: From Hook to Programmable Network OS
Companion Kubernetes-networking piece from the same collective, published 3 April. Traces the eBPF subsystem across XDP, struct_ops, AF_XDP, SmartNIC integration, and P4 tie-ins.
Get involved with DPDK
DPDK runs on code review. The fastest way to help this quarter is to read one patch and reply to the thread with an honest question or comment. You do not need commit access. You do not need to have contributed before.
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