Cambridge, UK: 18 August 2016

Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open-source software for its member companies, today announced the availability of the first Long Term Support (LTS) Monarch release of OpenDataPlane®. The OpenDataPlane project is an open-source, cross-platform set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for the networking Software Defined Data Plane.The code released is production ready and has been demonstrated by Linaro Networking group (LNG) members and their partners.

“This new OpenDataPlane Monarch LTS release provides real-world applications a stable and optimized set of APIs that run on accelerated Arm® Cortex®-based SoCs and SmartNICs. They can even run on commodity x86 hardware due to the high level of abstraction offered that can span the different architectures,” said François Frédéric Ozog, LNG Director at Linaro. “We’re looking forward to the release of commercial implementations later this month and expect to demonstrate a new L3FWD application and others in September at the next Linaro Connect in Las Vegas.”

This Monarch LTS release of OpenDataPlane (ODP) will enable other projects to leverage the acceleration provided by the ODP APIs knowing that the code base will be fully supported for the foreseeable future. Work has already begun on network protocol stacks such as OpenFastPath (OFP), products like the NGiNX web server accelerated with ODP and OFP and libraries like OpenSSL that provide crypto acceleration via ODP. In addition, ODP and ODP-based products, such as OFP, NGiNX and OpenSSL, can now be made available as packages in widely known Linux distributions such as CentOS, Debian and OpenEmbedded.

Reference implementations of OpenDataPlane provided by LNG as well as production grade implementations provided by various silicon partners will be available with this release. To accompany the release, Linaro has also launched a validation test suite that permits users and vendors to verify API compatibility between different ODP implementations. The specification, LNG reference implementations, and validation test suite are available today at OpenDataPlane.org. Performance implementations supporting hardware platforms offered by Cavium, Inc. and NXP will be available later this month.

OpenDataPlane is developed jointly by LNG members and the wider open-source community to represent the interests of application developers, silicon vendors and software solution providers.

“To meet the challenges associated with next-generation 5G networks, delivering an energy-efficient, high-performance and low-latency data plane which delivers application portability and vendor interoperability is critical,” said Phil Bourekas, director of network segment marketing, Arm. “The LTS Monarch release of ODP allows application developers to adopt it with confidence, and is a milestone in enabling the Arm ecosystem to offer differentiated hardware innovations with stable and consistent APIs across the entire network infrastructure.”

“By achieving this milestone release of OpenDataPlane (ODP), Linaro and all of the Linaro Network Group members are actively demonstrating the real benefits of our collaborative engineering efforts,” said Larry Wikelius, Vice President Software Ecosystem and Solutions Group at Cavium, Inc. “ODP is an outstanding proof point for the value of standard interfaces that allow Armv8 SOC vendors to showcase differentiating performance and features while still supporting leading software applications. Cavium, Inc. is proud to continue its tradition of open source community leadership and intends to deliver Monarch across the range of ThunderX® and OCTEON TX™, and OCTEON® III product families.”

“The Monarch release represents a very significant milestone for the ODP project at large, and for Enea as a member and contributor” says Daniel Forsgren, SVP Product Management at Enea. “We are excited to see that the ODP project has delivered on our expectations regarding performance and scalability, and we now have a production-ready ODP version that we will use as a platform for our work.”

“ODP Monarch is a significantly improved API and Linux generic implementation that provides easier integration for network function Apps”, said Aiguo Cui, Chief Architect, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. “We believe this release will be an important milestone in ODP history, and we will make our chipset support ODP Monarch and recommend it to our partners.”

“OpenDataPlane is an important part of our networking vision as it brings together all networking Systems on Chips (SoCs) enabling portability, high capacity and power efficient implementation,” said Jarmo Hillo, Head of Processor Technology at Nokia Bell Labs. “This new Monarch release realizes ODP’s original commercial promise and we look forward continuing our collaboration and integration with OpenFastPath to meet the ever evolving needs of the networking market.”

“ODP’s new OpenDataPlane ® LTS Monarch release supports rapid migration to a platform with accelerators, thereby enabling the throughput and efficiency required by today’s enterprise edge networking markets,” said ‎Sam Fuller, Head of Strategy System Solutions, Digital Networking at NXP Semiconductors. “NXP is pleased to announce support for the Monarch ODP API in a release that is available now on our multicore QorIQ processors based on Arm Cortex technology.”

About LNG The Linaro Networking Group (LNG) was founded in February 2013 and now consists of fourteen member companies including Arm, Broadcom, Cavium, Inc., Cisco, ENEA, Ericsson, Freescale, HiSilicon, MontaVista, Nokia, Texas Instruments, Wind, ZTE and Linaro. The OpenDataPlane project was established from the start of LNG to produce an open-source, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for the networking data plane, that offers both portability and automatic access to vendor-optimized platform acceleration capabilities, as well as linear scalability for applications deployed in many-core system environments. To find out more, please visit http://www.opendataplane.org/

About Linaro Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 250 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10. To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit and http://www.96Boards.org.