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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!

MEDIA ADVISORY: Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Publishes Defining White Paper

By Announcements

SAN FRANCISCO – July 20, 2020 –The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) project, hosted by the Linux Foundation, consists of libraries and drivers to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures, today announced the availability of a new white paper entitled, “Myth-busting DPDK in 2020: the past, present, and future of the most popular data plane development kit in the world.

 Produced by Avid Think and Converge! Network Digest with DPDK community support, the paper outlines the critical role DPDK plays in the evolution of networking infrastructure, while dispelling a number of myths and misconceptions about the technology. 

 “DPDK is a robust community that continuously adapts to shifts in technology with the goal of providing optimal value to the networking industry. As the community approaches the tenth anniversary of the project, we are pleased to release a thorough outline of DPDK’s capabilities and upcoming innovations,” said Jim St. Leger, DPDK Board Chair. 

 Topics outlined in the paper include:

  • Explanation/definition of DPDK
  • Market Evolution
  • DPDK Proliferation Across Architectures
  • Infrastructure Acceleration Trends and  DPDK’s Continued Market Evolution
  • What’s next for DPDK

 Download the white paper and check out  related videos on the top 10 DPDK myths, here: https://nextgeninfra.io/dpdk-myth-busting-2020/ 

 DPDK is 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, Ericsson, F5, Intel, Marvell, Mellanox (NVIDIA), Microsoft,  NXP, Red Hat, ZTE; Silver members 6Wind, AMD, Broadcom, Huawei; and Associate members Eötvös Loránd University, KAIST, Tsinghua University, University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of Limerick, and University of New Hampshire-Interoperability Lab. 

DPDK will host its annual DPDK Userspace summit as a virtual experience this year, September 22-23.  Userspace is a community event focused on software developers who contribute to or use DPDK, or are interested in doing so. The event includes presentations on the latest developments across DPDK, as well as in-depth discussions relevant topics to the open source data plane community. Registration is now open

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

 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. 

# # #

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks, including The Linux Foundation. For a full list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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

By Announcements

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:

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.

# # #

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks, including The Linux Foundation. For a full list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Cisco announces the traffic generator TRex

By Announcements

Originally posted by Andrew Harvey (agh) agh atcisco.com on the dpdk-dev mailing list 


A couple of people asked me at the SF DPDK Summit about Cisco’s Open
Source Packet Generator that leverages DPDK.

TRex an open source, low cost, stateful traffic generator fueled by DPDK.
It generates L4-7 traffic based on pre-processing and smart replay of real
traffic templates. Trex amplifies both client and server side traffic and
can scale to 200Gb/sec with one Cisco UCS using an Intel XL710.

I know the team would welcome comments and join development to help
extend/improve the project.

https://github.com/cisco-system-traffic-generator