The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) project has announced the availability of its DPDK 18.05 ‘Venky’ software release. The 18.05 Venky release is named after Venky Venkatesan, better 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.

“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,” he added.

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.

It is worth mentioning here that DPDK 18.05 ‘Venky’ release was built with contributions from over 160 developers, and over 1700 commits across more than 25 organizations.

Another exciting development in DPDK is the ability to run on Microsoft Windows. This is available in a draft repository 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.
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

DPDK was created in 2010 by Intel and made available under a permissive open source license.