Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Table of contents
- TL;DR
- Why this year’s schedule matters
- Four themes to watch
- Who should attend
- How to plan your summit
- Register now
DPDK Summit 2026 is where the community’s current work becomes visible all at once. This year’s schedule is not just a list of talks. It is a snapshot of where contributors, reviewers, and users are pushing next: production routing, cloud native deployments, hardware offload, verification, observability, and developer workflow.
With the full schedule now live, the summit is shaping up to be a strong two-day program for anyone building, deploying, or tuning DPDK-based systems. The event takes place May 12–13, 2026 in Stockholm, Sweden, with a virtual option for remote attendees. Times are displayed in Central European Summer Time, and the schedule is subject to change.
TL;DR
- Two days of DPDK-focused talks on routing, offload, observability, verification, and developer tooling
- The program highlights real deployment stories alongside core technical work, including Grout, FRR integration, Kubernetes-based routing, CERN data acquisition, rte_flow offload limits, and DPDK CI
- Community speakers from across the ecosystem are on the agenda, including voices from Red Hat, Intel, Marvell, ByteDance, CERN, Ericsson, Huawei Ireland Research Center, UNH Interoperability Labs, DynaNIC Semiconductors, HPE, BISDN, and more
- In-person registration includes talks, lightning talks, community sessions, the all-attendee reception, lunch, breaks, and an event T-shirt
- Review the schedule, pick your priority sessions, and register now
Why this year’s schedule matters
One of the most useful things about a DPDK Summit schedule is what it reveals between the lines. You can see where people are spending time, where pain points are surfacing, and which ideas are moving from theory into production. This year’s program highlights work across the full stack: from kernel boundaries and packet pipelines to routers on Kubernetes, cryptographic offload, eBPF tooling, eventdev concurrency, and test automation.
That breadth matters. It shows contributors where interesting work is happening next. It shows operators which deployment patterns are maturing. And it gives newer participants a fast way to understand where technical energy is building across the project.
The strongest schedules do more than fill time slots. They show where a project is headed.
Four themes to watch at DPDK Summit 2026
1) Production routing is having a strong moment
Some of the most compelling sessions this year focus on what it takes to move from capability to deployable systems. Grout: Two Years in – Building a Production-Ready DPDK Router, Integrating FRR With Grout, and Running a High-Performance DPDK-Based Router on Kubernetes point directly at a theme many in the community care about: how DPDK-powered networking stacks behave in the real world, not only in isolated performance setups.
That makes this track especially relevant for people building network functions, edge platforms, or cloud native datapaths. It is also a strong signal for anyone who wants more talks grounded in operating experience, integration work, and production trade-offs.
2) Offload and datapath evolution remain front and center
DPDK has always been close to the metal, and this year’s program keeps that focus sharp. Sessions such as DPDK and 802.11, Bridging DPDK and NIC HQoS With Priority-Aware Backpressure, Accelerate RSS Hash in Software With GFNI, Using DPDK on Embedded RISC-V Cores of a NIC, and Cryptographic Offloading To DPU/XPU PCI Cards Using Virtio-Crypto and DPDK Ethdev as Transport show how broad the hardware and acceleration story has become.
There is also a welcome dose of realism in Beyond Throughput: Exploring the Ambiguities and Limits of rte_flow Offloading. That kind of session usually lands well with core community audiences because it goes beyond feature checklists and gets into the practical boundary conditions that matter in design and deployment.
3) Correctness, visibility, and confidence are climbing the agenda
Another clear pattern in this year’s lineup is the growing emphasis on understanding what the datapath is doing and proving that it behaves as intended. Talks including AI-Assisted Formal Verification of the DPDK eBPF Verifier, Packet Capture Tool Based on eBPF for DPDK, Packet Capture Challenges, Multithreading on Eventdev, Yelled at by LLMs: Putting a Megaphone To AI Models in DPDK CI, and Develop With Confidence: Integrating the DPDK Test Suite With Your Development Workflow speak to a community that cares not just about speed, but about developer confidence and operational clarity.
That is a healthy sign. High-performance software becomes more durable when observability, verification, and CI are treated as first-class engineering concerns rather than afterthoughts.
4) The speaker roster reflects a broad, active ecosystem
A good summit schedule is also a community map. This year’s program brings together familiar contributors, reviewers, independent experts, and engineers from across vendors, operators, and research environments. Names on the schedule include Stephen Hemminger, Bruce Richardson, Mattias Rönnblom, Robin Jarry, Aaron Conole, Akhil Goyal, Patrick Robb, Robert McMahon, Roland Sipos, Claudia Cauli, and many others.
That diversity is part of the value. It means attendees are not getting one narrow view of the ecosystem. They are seeing DPDK from the angles of performance engineers, integrators, operators, tooling builders, and deployers.
Why it matters
If you review patches, ship packets, tune queues, evaluate offload strategies, or maintain DPDK-based systems, this year’s summit offers more than updates. It offers context.
It is a chance to see:
- where deployment patterns are getting more mature
- where offload promises meet real constraints
- how tooling and CI are evolving around the core datapath
- which topics are attracting fresh energy across the community
For long-time contributors, that context helps frame the next set of technical conversations. For newer participants, it is one of the fastest ways to understand the project’s current center of gravity.
Who should attend
This schedule should be especially relevant for:
- DPDK maintainers and reviewers tracking where new energy is showing up
- application developers building or integrating DPDK-based networking software
- platform teams working on cloud native or Kubernetes-based networking
- NIC, offload, crypto, and accelerator engineers
- operators running high-performance packet processing in production
How to plan your summit
The official schedule notes that times are displayed in Central European Summer Time and that the program is subject to change, so it is worth reviewing your agenda in your local timezone before the event.
A simple way to get value from the two days:
- Pick one core architecture session. Good options include talks on 802.11, kernel path decisions, rte_flow offload, or eventdev.
- Pick one real deployment session. Grout, FRR integration, Kubernetes routing, and CERN are strong candidates.
- Pick one tooling and confidence session. eBPF capture, formal verification, CI, and the DPDK Test Suite are likely to generate useful follow-up conversations.
If you are attending in person, stay for the all-attendee reception on Tuesday and the BoF sessions on Wednesday. Those are often where follow-up questions turn into real collaboration.
Register now
DPDK Summit 2026 runs May 12–13 in Stockholm, with both in-person and virtual attendance available. The schedule is live, the sessions are strong, and the speaker lineup reflects real depth across the ecosystem.
Now is the right time to review the agenda, decide which conversations matter most to you, and register.
About the Linux Foundation
DPDK is a part of The Linux Foundation, 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: 03/04/2026
AI Disclosure This post used artificial intelligence tools for research, structural assistance, or grammatical refinement. The final content was reviewed, edited, and validated by human contributors to DPDK to ensure accuracy and alignment with our community standards. We remain committed to transparency in the use of generative technologies within the open source ecosystem.
