In Review: FD.io in 2023 By Dave Wallace, FD.io TSC Chair
“Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…”
The FD.io release train continued to steam down the track in 2023 with another year of exceptional performance, and on time delivery of VPP releases and CSIT Release reports.
The FD.io TSC members were highly active in supporting the achievement of the community’s goals — maintaining balanced representation via TSC nominated membership, spearheading cost savings, and enabling the acquisition and deployment of the latest hardware into the FD.io performance and CI lab. While several inactive projects were archived in 2023 as part of cost savings initiatives, the FD.io core projects, VPP and CSIT, continued to excel in raising the bar in data plane performance and benchmarking. Both projects continued the unbroken string of on-time releases since 2021. VPP 23.02 Release introduced 19 new features and 118 fixes, VPP 23.06 Release added 26 new features and 145 fixes, and VPP 23.10 contributed 15 new features and 106 fixes. CSIT completed a major upgrade of the organization and efficiency of the performance benchmarking system, including the new CSIT Dashboard (csit.fd.io), interactive VPP Report data presentation, and implementation of the latest draft of the MLRsearch algorithm (draft-ietf-bmwg-mlrsearch). Due to the vagaries of hardware release cycles, there was a limited deployment of new generation hardware (Intel SaphireRapids & IceLake-D CPUs, and Nvidia ConnectX-7 NICs) in the CSIT performance lab, however, 2024 is shaping up to be a banner year in terms of benchmarking VPP on the latest generation hardware.
VPP adoption continues to be a shining light for the FD.io Community. Calico/VPP has achieved General Availability in the Calico 3.27 release, making it a first class citizen as the Kubernetes data plane. Other open source projects are also adopting VPP as the data plane including OpenAirInterface, Surf, Terragraph, Sonic, and VyOS — the following quote from the VyOS Project July 2023 Update makes the FD.io Community very proud:
The question of how to do 40 and 100-gigabit networking with VyOS becomes increasingly frequent as network speeds increase. Currently, kernel bypass networking is the answer to that question. General-purpose hardware and Linux kernel networking stack certainly caught up with 10 gigabits already, but everything beyond that still requires a fast path.
The most promising project for that role, as of now, is VPP.
I am grateful for all the contributions to the FD.io Community and would like to thank each and every one who contributed to FD.io in 2023. I am confident that FD.io will continue to attract and retain the contributions of those with a passion for excellence and continue to keep the train accelerating down the line throughout the year in 2024 and beyond.