TL;DR Summary
Thomas Monjalon shares insights from twelve years as a DPDK maintainer, exploring the technical necessity of user space networking and the intensive human work required to build vendor trust in a competitive ecosystem.
A conversation on technical trust, vendor politics, and why the hardest bugs to fix are in governance.
The industry needed DPDK because traditional kernel networking couldn’t keep pace. At line rate, interrupt handling and context switching consumed so much CPU overhead that you were spending more time managing packet arrival than actually processing packets.
Telecommunications operators couldn’t deliver 4G services. Data centers were struggling with exponentially growing traffic. Cloud providers were building massive-scale infrastructure. The hardware existed to handle these workloads. The software bottlenecks prevented systems from using it.
“We needed it for telecommunications, without it, 5G and 6G would be very difficult to deliver. Even for 4G it was a real requirement,” Thomas Monjalon explains. “We needed it in data centers where we have to manage very high throughput for all the data.”
DPDK solved the performance problem. It let applications bypass the Linux kernel and process network packets directly in user space, achieving throughput that kernel networking simply cannot match. The architecture optimized for every CPU, used hardware features fully, and gave applications direct access to network devices. Early implementations delivered 10x performance over the kernel stack.
The technical bet paid off immediately. The governance bet nearly killed it.
Thomas Monjalon joined French networking company 6WIND in 2012 to work on Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization. DPDK was essential infrastructure for that work. He started contributing to the project, learning its architecture, becoming part of the nascent community.
Within a year, he became one of the first DPDK maintainers from outside Intel, joining other early community builders. Over the next twelve years, he would become one of the key architects of DPDK’s transformation, building trust through patient, daily work, establishing governance structures, guiding contributors, mediating technical debates between competing vendors, and ensuring every detail reinforced DPDK’s commitment to genuine openness.
What DPDK Actually Does
DPDK is a framework for building high-performance network and security applications. It provides direct access to network hardware, bypassing the kernel to achieve maximum throughput and minimum latency. The framework handles packet processing, memory management, and device drivers for CPUs and NICs from multiple vendors.
“DPDK lets us use the full power of the hardware,” Thomas says. “When you use DPDK on new hardware, you don’t need to over-provision.” Using hardware to its full potential means purchasing less of it, consuming less power, reducing waste.
The project started focused on networking but expanded as industry needs evolved. “In networking, you often need cryptography as well,” Thomas explains. DPDK now includes cryptography support and is building complete libraries for security protocols. The project has comprehensive IPsec support and is now supporting TLS, MACsec, and PDCP. WireGuard and QUIC are on the roadmap.
The Governance Problem
Intel released DPDK under an open source license, but licensing alone doesn’t create an open community. The project was called “Intel DPDK.” The roadmap reflected Intel’s priorities. Contribution mechanics were opaque. Other hardware vendors, Intel’s direct competitors, needed DPDK for their own products, but joining meant potentially subsidizing a rival’s platform.
“At the beginning when the project was internally managed, nobody wanted to join,” Thomas explains. Companies sent patches. They asked for features. They never received clear signals about whether their contributions fit the project’s direction.
The industry needed DPDK, but if it remained locked to one vendor’s interests, the ecosystem would fracture. For DPDK to succeed as infrastructure for the entire industry, it needed governance that everyone could trust. Someone had to build that trust patch by patch, decision by decision, conflict by conflict.
The Part Nobody Talks About Enough
Before the achievements: DPDK is genuinely hard to integrate, and Thomas will tell you so directly.
“It’s quite difficult to integrate DPDK because it’s mostly responsible for low-level layers,” he says. “When you build an application from scratch, you also need to write all the upper layers.”
DPDK applications bypass kernel protections and standard networking APIs. Developers must understand hardware details that kernel abstractions normally hide. The learning curve is steep. For workloads where throughput and latency are critical, DPDK makes the right tradeoffs.
Proving Openness Through Actions
Thomas became a DPDK maintainer in 2013, one of the first from outside Intel. His role evolved from writing code to building community infrastructure. The contribution process needed documentation. The governance model needed transparency. The technical board needed representation from competing vendors.
In 2014, control of releases and contributions moved to dpdk.org. But concerns remained. Other hardware providers, particularly ARM, wouldn’t participate in a project they saw as Intel-controlled. Intel faced a choice: maintain de facto control, or commit to genuinely shared governance. They chose shared governance, recognizing that genuine open source requires more investment, not less.
the Linux Foundation provided the neutral ground this transformation required, giving the project institutional independence from any single company. Companies including Intel, NXP, Marvell, Mellanox (now NVIDIA), and others committed funding and engineering resources.
“It took years to build trust through actions, not just words,” Thomas reflects.
Bridging Vendor Cultures
Hardware vendors approach problems differently. DPDK needed these vendors to collaborate on shared infrastructure while competing in the market.
“Some design decisions create winners and losers,” Thomas notes. “You have to manage those decisions carefully so everyone understands the real goal is a truly open source project.”
Over time, vendors learned they could influence DPDK more effectively through participation than through pressure. The community grew because participants saw their investments rewarded with actual influence over the project’s direction.
The Work of Building Community
Thomas’s days involve what he calls “improving every detail.” Maintainership means reviewing patches, guiding contributors, refining processes, and ensuring quality. It means paying attention to the small things that collectively determine whether a community functions well or poorly.
“The technical board is very important because that’s where we can step back and think about what the real priorities are, where we should go,” Thomas explains.
The Long View
Twelve years after Thomas and other early maintainers started working to build trust in DPDK’s governance, the work continues. The framework must support emerging security protocols. GPUs are being integrated for specialized processing workloads.
Thomas remains focused on continuous improvement. “When working on DPDK, I’m constantly improving details,” he says. The trust built through consistent, fair treatment of all contributors now enables companies and developers worldwide to build on DPDK confidently.
Getting Involved
“Start with simple modifications,” Thomas suggests. “It’s better if you begin with something small, it’s your first time training in the process. You’re learning from others.”
Code review doesn’t require being a maintainer or years of DPDK experience—just the ability to read patches carefully and provide thoughtful feedback. “When you start contributing and getting involved, try to be consistent in your investment,” Thomas emphasizes.
Get involved: Review your first patch
About the DPDK Project
The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. By moving packet processing to the user space, DPDK allows for higher performance than is typically possible using the kernel’s network stack.
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
Last Updated: 03/24/2026
