Linaro Announces OpenDataPlane Tiger Moth LTS Software Release with Support for Arm and x86

Software Defined Data Plane Supports SoCs, SmartNICs, and Servers With Full Support for Accelerated IPsec Processing

[Hong Kong, China, 19 March 2018] Linaro Ltd, the open source collaborative engineering organization developing software for the Arm ecosystem, today announced the availability of the second Long Term Support (LTS) release of OpenDataPlane ® , code named “Tiger Moth”. The OpenDataPlane project is an open-source, cross-platform set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for the networking Software Defined Data Plane.

OpenDataPlane has been optimized to take advantage of Arm-based SoC (System on Chip) processors that provide a very high level of integration of high performance network interfaces and hardware packet and crypto accelerators. Another benefit is that OpenDataPlane supports the ability to run the exact same software code base on both x86 and Arm-based server class processors using standard NICs or SmartNICs, that utilize DPDK for input and output.

OpenDataPlane acts as a standard unifying architecture that allows true “write once, accelerate anywhere” applications to take best advantage of polled or event driven network architectures and hardware accelerators with little to no effort. Now OEMs and software developers can more easily take advantage of new and improved silicon without fork-lift upgrades to their applications.

Reference implementations of OpenDataPlane provided by the Linaro Networking Group (LNG) as well as production-grade implementations provided by various silicon partners are available. The Linaro components, consisting of the API Specification, Reference Implementations, and Validation Test Suite, can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/Linaro/odp) and via the OpenDataPlane web site (https://opendataplane.org/downloads/). Links to performance- optimized native Arm-based SoC implementations from LNG member companies, including Cavium™, are available at the same location on the ODP web site.

“This new OpenDataPlane ‘Tiger Moth’ LTS release provides real world applications a stable and optimized set of APIs that run on accelerated Arm-based SoCs, Arm-based and x86 servers, and SmartNICs. This release includes full support for IPsec offload to meet the needs for line-rate secure communication, as well as many other advancements over the previous ‘Monarch’ LTS release,” said François-Frédéric Ozog, LNG Director at Linaro. OpenDataPlane Features include:

• Common Application API across Arm and x86
• Support for Inline IPsec (little to no involvement of processor cores)
• Support for IPsec Lookaside processing
• Support for Arm-based SoCs
• Support for Arm-based Servers
• Support for SmartNICs

• Support for x86 Servers

• Support for Hardware Packet Accelerators including
  • Buffer/Packet managers
  • Packet Parsers and Classifiers
  • Packet ordering engines
  • Integrated cryptographic processing
  • Integrated I/O
• Support for both Hardware and Software Schedulers and Load Balancers
• Support for both Hardware and Software Traffic Managers
• Support for FAT IPsec pipes - ability to load balance traffic across multiple cores
• Support for DPDK on Arm and x86
• Full Validation Test Suites available
• Embedded and Cloud Ready
• Production-grade implementations available

OpenDataPlane is developed jointly by LNG members and the wider open source community to represent the interests of application developers, silicon vendors, telecom equipment manufacturers and software solution providers, and has been validated on both Arm and x86- based systems.

“The Tiger Moth release of ODP highlights the power of collaboration between Arm and Linaro to deliver innovative networking infrastructure solutions” said Mark Hambleton, senior director, Open Source Software, Arm. “The ability to bring forward the capabilities of unique solutions from our partners, while delivering truly cross-platform portability across a broad range of offerings, is a key value of the Arm ecosystem”

“OpenDataPlane (ODP) continues to increase its value. With this release that supports Arm- based SoCs, Arm-based Servers, and even DPDK on x86 Servers, Linaro and all of the Linaro Network Group members are again 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-based SoC and server vendors to showcase differentiating performance and features while still supporting leading software applications. Cavium is proud to continue its tradition of open source community leadership and intends to deliver Tiger Moth across the range of ThunderX ® , ThunderX2 ® and OCTEON TX ® product families.”

Enea has been a member of LNG and contributor to the ODP project for several years, and the OpenDataPlane cross-platform API is today supported and leveraged by Enea’s own data plane solutions. “The Tiger Moth release represents a new significant milestone for the OpenDataPlane project at large, and is a key platform for our continued work with accelerated data plane and OS solutions across a broad range of CPU architectures, including both Arm and Intel-based hardware platforms,” said Adrian Leufvén, SVP OS Business Unit, Enea. The Tiger Moth software release supports Nokia’s end-to- end Future X vision for 5G and the silicon advances made with its recently announced ReefShark chipset family. Tiger Moth supports critical features of 5G such as low latency and high throughput. “Tiger Moth-based system software is an essential part of Nokia Reefshark and Nokia’s Future X realization,” said Jarmo Hillo, Processor Technology Lead at Nokia Networks.

OpenDataPlane has been a key component already from the start of the OpenFastPath (OFP) project. The event driven architecture of OFP is derived directly from OpenDataPlane, which

also provides the former project with the necessary cross-platform portability. “OFP’s future roadmap will take full advantage of the Tiger Moth release. OpenDataPlane provides the necessary platform for event driven packet processing, and we are excited to continue our work in close collaboration with Linaro,” said Daniel Forsgren, President of the OpenFastPath Foundation.

About LNG

The Linaro Networking Group (LNG) was founded in February 2013 by twelve member companies. 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.

About Linaro

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 300 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 https://www.linaro.org and https://www.96Boards.org.